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THE ROMANTIC STORY of 
the MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 

AND ITS PLACE IN THE 
LIFE OF TO-DAY 



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THE 

ROMANTIC STORY 

OF THE MAYFLOWER 

PILGRIMS 

AND ITS PLAGE IN TH 
LIFE OF TO-DAY 

'^ BY 

A^^'cV ADDISON 

AUraOK OF "OlD BOSTOH ITS PURITAN SONS 
AND PILGRIM SHRINES," ETC. 

WITH NUMEROUS ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS 




New Edition, with Explanatory Notes 



BOSTON 
THE PAGE COMPANY 

MDCCCCXVIII 



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'CI.A508646 



PREFACE 



"^ Y a strange yet happy coincidence, on the 

D\ very day the writer of these lines sat 
^ silent in a Pilgrim cell at Boston — the 

Lincolnshire town where the Pilgrims were im- 
prisoned in their first attempt to flee their native 
country — pondering on the past and inscribing 
his humble fines to the New World pioneers, the 
President of the American Repubfic was at 
Provincetown, Massachusetts, dedicating a giant 
monument to the planters of New Plymouth, 
the last of the many memorials erected to them. 
The date was the fifth of August, 191 o. Presi- 
dent Taft in his address at the commemoration 
ceremonies declared very truly that the purpose 
which prompted the Pilgrims' progress and the 
spirit which animated them furnish the United 
States to-day with the highest ideals of moral 
fife and pofitical citizenship. Three years before, 
another American President, Mr. Roosevelt, at 
the cornerstone laying of this monument, en- 
larged on the character of their achievement, 
and in ringing words proclaimed its immensity 
and world-wide significance. 

Down through the years the leaders of men 
have borne burning witness to the wonderful 
work of the Pilgrim Fathers. Its influence is 
deep-rooted in the world's history to-day, and 



VI 



PREFACE 



in the life and the past of our race it stands its 
own enduring monument. 

The object of the present narrative is to give 
to the reader an account of the Mayflower 
Pilgrims that is concise and yet sufficiently com- 
prehensive to embrace all essentials respecting 
the personality and pilgrimage of the Fore- 
fathers, whom the poet Whittier pictures to us 
in vivid verse as: 

those brave men who brought 
To the ice and iron of our winter time 
A will as firm, a creed as stern, and wrought 
With one mailed hand and with the other fought. 

In the pages which follow, the Old World 
homes and haunts of the Pilgrim Fathers are 
depicted and described. The story has the ad- 
vantage of having been written on the scene of 
their early trials, concerted plans of escape, and 
stormy emigration, by one who, from long asso- 
ciation, is familiar with the history and tradi- 
tions of Boston and the quaint old sister port of 
Gainsborough, and perhaps imparts to the work 
some feeling of the life and local atmosphere 
of those places in the days that are dealt with, 
and before. The Pilgrims are followed into 
Holland and on their momentous journey across 
seas to the West. The story aims at being 
trustworthy and up-to-date as regards the later 
known facts of Pilgrim history and the develop- 
ments which reflect it in our own time. It does 
what no other book on the subject has attempted; 



PREFACE 



Vll 



it traces the individual lives and varying fortunes 
of the Pilgrims after their settlement in the New 
World; and it states the steps taken in recent 
years to perpetuate the memory of the heroic 
band. The tale that is told is one of abiding 
interest to the Anglo-Saxon race; and its at- 
tractiveness in these pages is enhanced by 
the series of illustrations which accompanies 
the printed record. Grateful acknowledgment 
is made of much kindly assistance rendered 
during the preparation of the work, especially 
by the Honourable William S. Kyle, Treasurer 
of the First (Pilgrim) Church at Plymouth, 
Massachusetts. 



Men they were who could not bend; 
Blest Pilgrims, surely, as tbey look jor guide 
A will by sovereign Conscience sanctified. 

From Rite and Ordinance abused tbey fled 
To Wilds where bolb were utterly unknown. 

— Wordsworth, "Ecclesiastical Sonnets," 
Part III. Aspects of Cbristiajiity in 
America, I. Tbe Pilgrim Fathers. 

In romance of circumstance and tbe charm oj personal hero- 
ism tbe story oj the Pilgrim Fathers is pre-eminent. 

— J. A. Doyle's "English in America." 



The coming hither oj the Pilgrim three centuries ago . . . 
shaped the destinies oj this Continent, and therejore projoundly 
affected tbe destiny oj the whole world. 

— President Roosevelt, at tbe laying 
oj tbe corner-stone oj tbe Pilgrim 
Memorial Monument at Provincetown, 
Massachusetts, August 20tb, 1907. 



CONTENTS 

Chapter Page 

Preface v 

Notes to Illustrations xiii 

I. Old World Homes and Pilgrim Shrines i 

II. The Arrest at Boston and Flight to 

Holland 27 

III. Life in Leyden — Adieu to Plymouth — 

The Voyage to the West 47 

IV. " Into a World Unknown " — Trials and 

Triumph 71 

V. The Pilgrim Roll Call — Fate and For- 
tunes OF THE Fathers 123 

VI. New World Pilgrims to Old World 

Shrines 159 

Index 189 



^ 




The Cells, Guildhall, Boston 
With winding staircase to court-room above 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PA<S 

The Mayflower in Plymouth Harbour .... Frontispiece 

The Cells, Guildhall, Boston 7a ^ 

A Bit of Old Gainsborough $ ^ 

The Old Manor House, Scrooby, where William Brewster was 

born. — Scrooby Church 9 ^ 

The Cottage at Austerfield where William Bradford was bom . 13 . 
The Old Hall, Gainsborough, in which the Separatist Church 

was founded in 1602 17 

Guildhall and South Street, Boston ai 

The Old Courtroom, Guildhall, Boston 25 .,- 

The River Witham, Boston 29 , 

The Pilgrim Cells, Guildhall, Boston, showing the Kitchen 

beyond 33 

Old Town Gaol, Market-place, Boston 37 

Trentside, Gainsborough 41 . 

Elder William Brewster 45 

John Robinson's House, Leyden, where the Pilgrim Fathers 

worshipped 49 

St. Peter's Church, Leyden 53 

Bust of Captain John Smith 57 

The Embarkation of the Pilgrims 61 

Model of the Mayflower 65 '^ 

Plymouth Harbour, as seen from Cole's Hill 69 v 

The Landing of the Pilgrims 73 

The March of Miles Standish 77 

The Canopy over Plymouth Rock 81 

The Old Fort and First Meeting-House 85 v 

Pilgrims going to Church 89 ■ 

The Departure of the Mayflower 93 i 

Captain Miles Standish 97 

Governor William Bradford loi 

The Pilgrim Memorial Monument at Provincetown . . . . 105 



xii ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Plymouth Rock 109 

A Bit of Old Boston 113 

The Site of the Old Fort, Burial Hill, Plymouth 117 

First Church, Plymouth 121 

The Pilgrim Fathers' Memorial, Plymouth 125 

John Alden.— Priscilla MuIIins 129 , 

Governor Bradford's Monument, Burial Hill, Plymouth . 133 

Governor Carver's Chair and Ancient Spinning Wheel . . 137 

Elder Brewster's Chair and the Cradle of Peregrine White . 141 

The Grave of John Howland . 145 

The Grave of Miles Standish, Duxbury ... ... 149 

The Miles Standish Monument, Duxbury 153 

Governor Edward Winslow 157 

Mayflower Tablet on the Barbican, Plymouth, England . 161 '• 

Scrooby Village 165 ^ 

The Ancient Kitchen, Guildhall, Boston .... . 169 

Robinson Memorial Church, Gainsborough ^73 ■ 

Tablet in Vestibule of Robinson Memorial Church, Gains- 
borough. — Memorial Tablet on St. Peter's Church, Leyden. 177 \ 
Design by R. M. Lucas for the Tercentenary Memorial at 

Southampton 181 ^ 

The Font, Austerfield Church.— The Font, Primitive Methodist 

Chapel, Lound 185 ■ 



NOTES TO ILLUSTRATIONS 



The Old Manor House, Scrooby 



. Page 9 



On the outer wall of this historic building is a tablet 
erected by the Pilgrim Society of Plymouth, Mass., " to 
mark the site of the ancient Manor House where lived 
William Brewster from 1588 to 1608, and where he 
organised the Pilgrim Church, of which he became 
Ruling Elder, and with which in 1608 he removed to 
Amsterdam, in 1609 to Leyden, and in 1620 to Plym- 
outh, where he died April 16, 1644." 

A tablet in the Norman church of the neighbouring 
village of Austerfield records that the aisle in which it 
is placed was built in 1897 by the Society of Mayflower 
Descendants and other citizens of the United States of 
America " in memory of William Bradford, who was 
born at Austerfield and baptised in this church " on 
March 19, 1589. 

John Robinson's House, Leyden, where the Pilgrim 
Fathers Worshipped .... Page 4Q 

The building faces the Cathedral, and a marble slab 
placed upon it bears the inscription : " On this spot 
lived, taught and died, John Robinson, 1611-1625." 

Robinson's memorial tablet, fixed in a recess of the 
exterior of St. Peter's, in the vault of which he was 
buried, erected by the National Council of the Congre- 
gational Churches of America, was unveiled July 24, 
1 89 1, in the presence of delegates from England and the 
United States, the Burgomaster, and representatives of 
the Ecclesiastical Commissioners of the city and of the 



xiv NOTES TO ILLUSTRATIONS 

University of Leyden. A commemorative bronze to the 
Pilgrims was unveiled at Amsterdam on July ii, 1909. 

Bust of Captain John Smith . . . Page 57 

The bust show^n of Captain John Smith, founder of 
Virginia, was made by General Baden-Powell, the hero 
of Mafeking, and a descendant of Smith's, and presented 
by the general to Louth Grammar School, Lincolnshire, 
which Smith attended as a boy, and unveiled there on 
March 4, 1907, by the Hon. C. W. Kohlsaart, Com- 
missioner-General for the Jamestown Exposition, who 
gave to the school an American flag. The Hon. T. W. 
Cridler (former Assistant-Secretary of State, U. S. A.), 
and Mr. Lothrop Withington (historical Commissioner 
to the Jamestown Exposition), were present and spoke 
on the occasion. 

Captain John Smith was the Miles Standish of the 
Virginian expedition. His career was altogether ro- 
mantic. Big, and strong, and still under thirty. Smith 
was one of a party of untrained, and, for the most part, 
dissolute men, sent out by the Virginia Company with 
no experience to guide them; and but for his grasp of 
the situation, and dogged insistence in the teeth of 
obstacles and privations, an English footing at the 
mouth of the James River would never have been 
established. Smith was born in the village of Wil- 
loughby, at the foot of the Eastern Wolds, two miles 
from the town of Alford in Lincolnshire. The 
parish records show that he was baptised on Jan- 
uary 9, 1580, and his father was George Smith, a 
yeoman occupying a copyhold farm near the village 
under Lord Willoughby, and owning some acres of 
pasture land in Charlton Magna, and tenements in the 
town of Louth. By his father's death John Smith, as 
the elder of two sons, inherited this property, while yet 
a boy ; but he had set his heart upon a life of adventure. 



NOTES TO ILLUSTRATIONS xv 



After a period as pupil at Alford and Louth Grammar 
Schools, he was apprenticed to a merchant at Lynn, and 
soon found means to attend Master Peregrine Bertie, 
second son of George Smith's landlord and patron at 
Willoughby, into France. From Orleans he was sent 
home to his friends in Lincolnshire, who gave him ten 
shillings and their leave to go where he pleased. 

Smith roamed about like a hero of romance, and 
became captain of cavalry in the Turkish wars; was 
left for dead on the battlefield of Rothenthurm, was 
carried into captivity, and escaped. He returned to 
England, and in December, 1606, the first expedition 
sent by a chartered company for the colonisation of 
North America set sail from the Thames. Smith was 
of the party, although when they arrived at Jamestown 
he was in irons, for the council was hopelessly divided 
in opinion and had this pleasant way of dealing with 
the minority. Smith, however, was the only capable 
man among them, with an instinctive knowledge of how 
far to trust the natives and when to treat them with 
severity. He alone thought of making the settlement 
defensible, of maintaining firm discipline, of husband- 
ing the stores, and of engaging in more useful occu- 
pations than the vain quest of gold. 

Sailing up the James river, the Englishmen built 
Jamestown, which they named in honour of the king; 
and this was the first colony which struck its roots in 
American soil. When initial hardships had been over- 
come, and the welfare of the colony was in some measure 
assured, Captain Smith set forth with a few companions 
to explore the surrounding country. They were 
captured by the Indians ; and the tale of how they were 
all killed except John Smith, who was saved by the 
Indian chief's young daughter Pocahontas (who after- 
wards married the Englishman John Rolfe), is one of 
the incidents which have since caused Smith to be 



xvi NOTES TO ILLUSTRATIONS 

popularly remembered. When the captain returned 
from captivity, the colony was on the verge of ex- 
tinction; but Smith rallied the settlers, who were re- 
cruited by fresh arrivals. To the grief of the seasoned 
colonists, Smith returned to England after two and 
a half years' unremitting labour in Virginia. In 1614 
he visited the coast of what he named New England, 
explored every inlet from the Penobscot to Cape Cod, 
. and made a map of the shore-line. The next year 
the " saviour of Virginia " attempted to establish a 
second English colony in the land of the Plymouth 
Company. Storms balked the venture, but the un- 
daunted Smith persevered, and roused his countrymen 
to fresh action. He was nominated admiral of the 
projected Northern Colony for life; in 16 18 a new 
charter was obtained, and in 1620 the Crown incor- 
porated the reorganised company as the Council of 
Plymouth for New England, and made them a great 
grant of territory. But it remained for the Mayflower 
Pilgrims to effect the first permanent settlement in the 
country of the Northern Colony. John Smith, in 
1624, published his "General History of Virginia," 
containing good maps of the coasts of Maine and Mas- 
sachusetts. He died in London, possessed only of his 
small Lincolnshire property, on June 21, 1 631. His 
tomb in St. Sepulchre's Church was destroyed by the 
Great Fire of 1666. 



The Pilgrim Memorial Monument at Province- 
town Page JOS 

Located on an imposing site on Town Hill, this 
monument, constructed of Maine granite, rises to a 
height of three hundred and forty-seven feet above the 
harbour in which the famous compact was signed on 
board the Mayflower. With the single exception of the 
Washington Monument, it is the loftiest structure of 



NOTES TO ILLUSTRATIONS xvii 



solid masonry in the country. It closely resembles 
the square tower of the town hall at Sienna in Italy, 
erected in 1309, having, like the older tower, two rows 
of battlements, the first above two hundred and fifty 
feet from the ground, and the second surmounting 
the smaller tower which rises from the first row. 

The monument cost ninety thousand dollars, of which 
the National Government contributed forty thousand, 
the State of Massachusetts twenty-five thousand, and 
the Cape Cod Pilgrim Memorial Association the re- 
mainder. The cornerstone was laid by President 
Roosevelt on August 20, 1907, when memorial stones 
to the number of two hundred were given by towns, 
by various New England societies, and societies of 
Mayflower descendants, and these were placed inside 
the tower. The monument took three years to build, and 
there was a great gathering at the ceremonies attending 
its dedication by President Taft on August 5, 19 10. 

First Church, Plymouth . . . Page 121 

This, the fifth Pilgrim Church, stands on the scene 
where the pastors and teachers of the congregation have 
preached since " the first house for common use " was 
set up in January, 1621, and was followed by the fort 
with cannon on its roof on Burial Hill; these, in turn, 
being succeeded by the meeting-house of 1648, from 
which a bell here first knolled to church, and the house 
of 1683 and that of 1744. On April 10, 1831, the 
last religious service was held in the meeting-house 
which had stood for eighty-seven years, and a new 
building was dedicated on December 14th of that year. 
This church stood for sixty years, and was about to be 
re-opened after repairs when it took fire and was burnt 
to the ground on November 22, 1892; the Paul Revere 
bell, which had rung the nine o'clock curfew for three 
generations, sounded the alarm just before it fell amid 



xviii NOTES TO ILLUSTRATIONS 



the burning ruins. The fifth church, which stands 
where the old one stood on the slope of Burial Hill, 
worthily perpetuates the memory of the Pilgrim 
Founders whose traditions it enshrines. It is a fine 
edifice of the English Norman type of architecture, 
built of seam-faced granite with Ohio sandstone trim- 
mings. The cornerstone was laid on June 29, 1896, 
and the church was dedicated on December 21, 1899. 
At its front is a central tower, the entrance to which 
is through a series of receding arches leading to a 
memorial vestibule. The belfry of the tower contains 
the town bell, which has been referred to, cast by Paul 
Revere in 1801, whose tones, as in other days, still 
" mark the fleeting hours." A bronze tablet on the 
tower buttress near the front entrance is inscribed: 
" The Church of Scrooby, Leyden, and the Mayflower 
Company, gathered on this hillside in 1620, has ever 
since preserved unbroken records and maintained a 
continuous ministry, its first covenant being still the 
basis of its fellowship. In reverent memory of its 
Pilgrim Founders this Fifth Meeting-House was 
erected." Provision was made in the vestibule for placing 
on the marble wall the first covenant of the church, and 
other historic records deserving special remembrance. 
The church contains some beautiful commemorative 
windows. One of three lights at the north end, rep- 
resenting John Robinson delivering his farewell address 
to the departing Pilgrims at Delfshaven, was the gift 
of a sister of Mr. Edward G. Walker. In the chancel, 
above the handsomely carved pulpit, is another striking 
memorial of the Pilgrims and their work. The centre 
light of this window represents the Signing of the 
Compact in the cabin of the Mayflower, and was 
presented by the Society of Mayflower Descendants of 
New York. The side lights represent " Civil Liberty, 
the vital air of social progress " and " Religious Liberty, 



l'?l 



NOTES TO ILLUSTRATIONS xix 



true fruit of Pilgrim sowings," and were erected by the 
New England Society of Brooklyn to emphasise the 
fact that the civil and religious liberty now enjoyed 
originated in large measure with the brave men and 
women who founded the Plymouth Colony. The artist, 
Mr. Edward Peck Sperry, of New York, who designed 
all the glass figure work in the church, has, therefore, 
portrayed symbolically in the windows these two kinds 
of liberty under the manly forms of a Pilgrim soldier 
and a Pilgrim minister. Civil liberty is represented by 
the soldier, who is a soldier only in order to protect 
the liberty he personifies, for his sword is sheathed, 
never to be drawn except to defend the right — a liberty 
based upon the Compact of the Mayflower, found in 
the open book resting on the soldier's knee. Religious 
liberty is represented by the minister, who holds in one 
hand the scroll of the moral law, while his arm rests 
upon the foundation of truth, the Holy Scriptures, 
and his right hand is raised in exhortation and bene- 
diction as he announces the fundamental principles of 
religious liberty. 

The Pilgrim Father's Memorial, Plymouth, Page 125 

The cornerstone of this " National Monument to the 
Forefathers, erected by a grateful people in remem- 
brance of their labours, sacrifices and sufferings for the 
cause of Civil and Religious Liberty," was laid in 1859, 
and the Memorial was completed in 1889. It stands on 
a hill near the railroad station, and is eighty-one feet 
in height. Fifteen hundred tons of granite were used 
for the foundation. A pedestal rising forty-five feet 
bears a colossal statue of Faith, thirty-six feet high and 
two hundred times life size, holding a Bible in her right 
hand. The surrounding wing statues, each twenty 
feet high, are Morality, Law, Education and Freedom. 
The Memorial is the highest granite statue in the world. 



FROM A PILGRIM CELL 



The Pilgrims' Cells, 
Guildhall, Boston, Lincolnshire. 

^HIS is written in a Pilgrim cell, one of 
those dark and narrow dungeons which 
the Pilgrim Fathers tenanted three 
hundred and four years ago, in the autumn of 
1607, and behind the heavy iron bars of which 
men have for generations delighted to be locked 
in memory of their lives and deeds. The present- 
day gaoler, less terrible than his predecessor of 
Puritan times, has ushered me in and closed the 
rusty gate upon me, and left me alone, a wilhng 
prisoner for a space. I look around, but do not 
start and shrink in mortal dread as must once 
the hapless captives here immured. 

'Tis a gloomy place as a rule; but just now 
some outer basement doors, flung open, admit 
the autumn sunlight, which floods the hall floor 
and penetrates to the cell where I am seated. 
To get here I have stooped and sidled through 
an opening a foot and a half wide and five feet 
deep, set in a whitewashed wall fourteen inches 
thick. I stand with arms outstretched, and 
find that the opposite wafls may be pressed with 
the finger-tips of each hand. The cell extends 
back seven feet, and the height is the same be- 
tween the bare stone floor and the roughly 



xxii FROM A PILGRIM CELL 

boarded roof. All is dingy, cobwebbed, musty, 
and silent as the grave. Like the neighbouring 
tenement it is cold, mean, melancholy, fit only 
to be shunned. Yet its associations are dear 
indeed. For this is holy ground, a hallowed 
spot, a Mecca of modern pilgrims. It has a 
history held sacred in two hemispheres, that 
of rehgious persecution, of loyal resolution, of 
physical fetters and spiritual freedom. 

Such is the story inscribed upon these walls, 
a record which may be read in all their time- 
worn stones, on every inch of their rusted bolts 
and bars. For they are the cells of the Pilgrim 
Fathers. Here was the first rude break in their 
weary worldly progress, a journey which was to 
continue with affliction into Holland, thence back 
to Plymouth, and, after a last adieu there to 
Enghsh soil, on in the httle Mayflower to New 
Plymouth and a New England. 

Alone in a Pilgrim cell! What thoughts the 
situation kindles; how eagerly the imagination 
shapes and clothes them; what scenes this 
mouldy atmosphere unfolds. The very sohtude 
is eloquent with pious reminiscence; the void is 
filled again, peopled with those spectres of an 
imperishable past; their prayers and praise fall 
on the hstening ear, a soft appeal for grace and 
strength, the luIHng notes of a rough psalmody; 
then answering dreams and visions of the night. 

THE AUTHOR. 



I 



OLD WORLD HOMES AND 
PILGRIM SHRINES 



THE ROMANTIC STORY of 
the MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 



I 

OLD WORLD HOMES AND 
PILGRIM SHRINES 

View each well-known scene: 
Think what is now and what bath been. — Scott. 

INCOLNSHIRE stands pre-eminent 
among the English shires for inspiriting 
L_^ records of trials borne and conflicts 



waged for conscience' sake. The whole country, 
from the lazy Trent to the booming eastern sea, 
teems moreover with religious interest. To read 
what happened between the births of two famous 
Lincolnshire men — Archbishop Langton in the 
twelfth century; and Methodist John Wesley in 
the seventeenth — is like reading the history of 
Enghsh nonconformity. The age of miracles 
was long since past; yet Stephen Langton, Pri- 
mate of England and Cardinal of Rome, was a 
champion of the national hberties. He aided, 
nay instigated, the wresting of Magna Charta 
from King John. That was not the result of his 
education; 'twas the Lincolnshire blood in his 
veins. For the outrage on the Romish tradi- 

3 



4 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

tions the Archbishop was suspended by the Pope. 
Probably he would have been hanged if they 
could have got at him. 

But we can go back farther even than Lang- 
ton's time. Not many miles from Gainsborough 
is the Danish settlement of Torksey, rich in 
ecclesiastical lore. Here Pauhnus baptised the 
Lindissians on the sandy shore of the Trent, in 
the presence of Edwin, King of Northumbria. 
Hereabout, they say, King Alfred the Great was 
married to the daughter of Etheldred, and the 
old wives of Gainsborough used to recite tales 
of Wickhffe hiding on the spot where once stood 
the dweOing-pIace of Sweyn and of Canute. 

Lincolnshire has always had the courage to 
bear religious stress, and strange things are 
read of it. It was near Louth that the insur- 
rection known as "The Pilgrimage of Grace" 
began. Eighty-five years before the sailing of 
the Mayflower, and thirty years before William 
Brewster was born, the ecclesiastical commis- 
sioners for the suppression of monasteries (which 
were plentiful in Lincolnshire) went down to 
hold a visitation at Louth. But the excursion 
was not to their pleasure. As one of them rode 
into the town he heard the alarm bell pealing 
from the tower, and then he saw people swarm- 
ing into the streets carrying bills and staves, 
"the stir and noise arising hideous." He fled 
into the church for sanctuary, but they hauled 
him out, and with a sword at his breast bade 
him swear to be true to the Commonwealth. 



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THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 7 

He swore. That was the Examiner. When the 
Registrar came on the scene he was with scant 
ceremony dragged to the market cross, where 
his commission was read in derision and then 
torn up, and he barely escaped with his Hfe. 
For the same cause there were risings at Caistor 
and Horncastle — two of the demurest of mod- 
ern towns. The Bishop's Chancellor was mur- 
dered in the streets of Horncastle and the body 
stripped and the garments torn to rags; and at 
Lincoln the episcopal palace was plundered and 
partially demolished. 

But Lincolnshire need rest no fame upon such 
merits as these. Greater honour belongs to the 
county, for it was Lincolnshire that made the 
most important of all contributions to the build- 
ing of America when it sent forth the Pilgrim 
Fathers, and afterwards the Puritan leaders, 
who met for conference in the eventful days of 
the movement in Boston town, in Sempringham 
manor house, or in Tattershall Castle, to lay the 
foundations of the Massachusetts settlements. 
And, as Doyle in his "Enghsh in America," 
truly says, " In romance of circumstance and the 
charm of personal heroism the story of the Pil- 
grim Fathers is pre-eminent. They were the 
pioneers who made it easy for the rest of the 
host to follow." Their colony was the germ of 
the New England States. 

Amid the quiet pastures threaded by the 
Ryton stream, where the counties of York and 
Lincoln and Nottingham meet, are two small 



8 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

villages, the homes of the only Pilgrim Fathers 
satisfactorily traced to English birthplaces. A 
simple, pathetic interest clings to these secluded 
spots. At Scrooby is the manor house wherein 
WilHam Brewster, the great heart of the pil- 
grimage and foremost planter of New Plymouth, 
was born. Archbishops of York had found a 
home here for centuries; Wolsey, at the close of 
his strangely checkered career, lodged there 
and planted a mulberry tree in the garden; 
Bishop Bonner dated a letter thence to Thomas 
Cromwell. And when WiHiam Brewster be- 
came Elder Brewster, pensive Puritans often 
gathered there to worship, "and with great love 
he entertained them when they came, making 
provision for them to his great charge." His 
condition was prosperous and he could well afford 
to do it. A Cambridge man, Brewster early 
took his degree at Peterhouse; he next saw 
service at Court, and accompanied Secretary 
Davison to the Netherlands; afterwards suc- 
ceeding his father and grandfather as post on 
the great North Road at Scrooby, a responsible 
and well-paid office, which he filled for nearly 
twenty years. 

The parish church, **not big, but very well 
builded," as Leiand said; the quaint old vicarage; 
the parish pound, and all that remains of the 
parish stocks: these stand witness to the antiq- 
uity of Scrooby. A httle railway station and 
rushing Northern expresses are almost the only 
signs of twentieth century activity. 




Photograph hy Welchnuin Bros., Retford 

The Old Manor House, Scrooby, where William 
Brewster was Born 




THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS ii 

The Scrooby community was an off-shoot 
from that at Gainsborough, the first Separatist 
church formed in the North of England, of which 
the pastor was John Smyth, a graduate of Cam- 
bridge, an "eminent man in his time" and "well 
beloved of most men." Smyth preached at Gains- 
borough from 1602 to 1606, when he was driven 
into exile. The members of his church gathered 
from miles around to its services, crossing into 
Gainsborough by the ferry-boat on the Trent. 
This continued for two or three years, until at 
length "these people became two distinct bodies 
or churches, and in regard of distance did con- 
gregate severally; for they were of sundry towns 
and villages." 

Richard Clyfton, once rector of Babworth 
near Retford — "a grave and reverend preacher" 
— was the first pastor at Scrooby; and with 
him as teacher was "that famous and worthy 
man Mr. John Robinson," another seceder from 
the English Church, who afterwards was pastor 
for many years "till the Lord took him away 
by death." 

Next to Brewster, William Bradford was the 
most prominent of the lay preachers among the 
Scrooby fraternity. He became Governor Brad- 
ford of the Plymouth Colony — "the first 
American citizen of the English race who bore 
rule by the free choice of his brethren" — and 
the historian of the Plymouth Plantation. Brad- 
ford, a yeoman's son with comfortable home 
surroundings, lived at Austerfield, an ancient 



12 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

agricultural village about three miles from 
Scrooby on the Yorkshire side. The pretty 
cottage of his birth is still shown by the roadside 
near the Norman church, and the parish register 
bears the record of his baptism, on March 19, 
1589. A youth of seventeen years, he walked 
across the fields to join the Scrooby brethren in 
their meetings. He and Brewster, the two men 
who were to impress their individuality so power- 
fully upon the rehgious life of the American 
people, became firm friends, and, says their later 
historian,^ that friendship, "formed amid the 
tranquil surroundings of the North Midlands of 
their native land, was to be deepened by common 
labours and aspirations, and by common hard- 
ships and sufferings endured side by side both in 
the Old World and the New." 

But it was Robinson to whom they jointly 
owed much guidance. When, in Bradford's 
own words, "They could not long continue in 
any peaceable condition, but were hunted and 
persecuted on every side;" when "some were 
taken and clapt up in prison, and others had 
their houses beset and watched night and day, 
and hardly escaped their hands;" and when 
"the most were fain to fly and leave their homes 
and habitations and the means of their liveh- 
hood," it was John Robinson, the devout and 
learned pastor, who led them out of Notting- 
hamshire into HoHand, and there inspired within 

'Dr. John Brown in "The Pilgrim Fathers of New 
England and their Puritan Successors." 




THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 

them the vision of complete earthly freedom in 
the new country across the Atlantic. 

Robinson was a Lincolnshire man. Gains- 
borough claims him, and on Gainsborough his 
first sohd memorial has been raised. Many 
are familiar with Gainsborough who have never 
seen the town. Up the Trent sailed Sweyn, 
the sanguinary Dane, to conquest; and his son 
Canute — he that ordered back the rising tide, 
and got a wetting for his pains — was at Gains- 
borough when he succeeded him as King of 
England. 

Gainsborough is the St. Ogg's of "The Mill 
on the Floss," and the Trent is the Floss, along 
which Tom and Maggie TuHiver "wandered 
with a sense of travel, to see the rushing spring- 
tide, the awful ^^gir, come up like a hungry 
monster" — the inrush of the first wave of the 
tide, a phenomenon peculiar at that time to 
both the Trent and the Witham. 

What George EHot wrote of St. Ogg's describes 
old Gainsborough to-day — "A town which 
carries the trace of its long growth and history 
like a millennial tree, and has sprung up and 
developed in the same spot between the river 
and the low hill from the time when the Roman 
legion turned their backs on it from the camp on 
the hillside, and the long-haired sea-kings came 
up the river and looked with fierce eyes at the 
fatness of the land." 

And in sketching the history of St, Ogg's the 
novelist remembered that time of ecclesiastical 




i6 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

ferment now written about, when "Many honest 
citizens lost all their possessions for conscience' 
sake, and went forth beggared from their native 
town. Doubtless there are many houses stand- 
ing now," she said, **on which those honest 
citizens turned their backs in sorrow, quaint 
gabled houses looking on the river, jammed 
between newer warehouses, and penetrated by 
surprising passages, which turn at sharp angles 
till they lead you out on a muddy strand over- 
flowed continually by the rushing tide." Did 
not Maggie TuIHver, in white mushn and simple, 
noble beauty, attend an "idiotic beggar" in the 
still existing Old Hall, where the Fathers wor- 
shipped and John Smyth taught — "a very 
quaint place, with broad, jaded stripes painted 
on the walls, and here and there a show of heral- 
dic animals of a bristly, long-snouted character, 
the cherished emblems of a noble family once the 
seigniors of this now civic hall"? 

In this Old Hall the Separatist church was 
founded in 1602, and here it had the friendly 
protection of the Hickman family, Protestants 
whose religious sympathies had brought them 
persecution and exile in the past. 

But the "foreign-looking town" which George 
Eliot endowed with romance had, like the 
neighbouring estuary town of Boston, which her 
language might have served almost as well to 
paint, been the abode of hard, historic fact. 
We can imagine the Scrooby brethren crossing 
the ancient ferry to bid their friends at Gains- 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 19 

borough farewell. For in 1607 we read, this 
"groupe of earnest professors of religion and 
bold assertors of the principle of freedom and 
personal conviction in respect to the Christian 
faith and practice" had formed the resolution 
to seek in another country the hberty they found 
not at home.^ But it was as unlawful to flee 
from their native land as to remain in it without 
conforming, for the statute of 13 Richard II, 
still in force, made emigrating without authority 
a penal crime. 

Not Gainsborough alone in the North and 
East appeals to the never-ending stream of 
reverent New World pilgrims to Old World 
shrines. On an autumn day of the year above 
named came Elder Brewster to the famed new 
borough of Boston. There he cautiously looked 
about him, and made a bargain with the captain 



^"Seeing themselves thus molested, and that there was 
no hope of their continuance there, they resolved to go 
into y^ Low Countries, wher they heard was freedome of 
religion for all men; as also how Sundrie from London, 
and other parts of y^ land had been exiled and persecuted 
for y^ same cause, and were gone thither and Hved at 
Amsterdam and in other places of y^ land, so afFter they 
had continued togeither about a year, and kept their 
meetings every Saboth, in one place or other, exercising 
the worship of God amongst themselves, notwithstanding 
all y^ dilligence and mahce of their adversaries, they 
seeing they could no longer continue in y' condition, 
they resolved to get over into HoIISd as they could 
which was in y^ year 1607-1608." — Bradford's "History 
of Plymouth Plantation." 



'('. I 



20 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

of a Dutch vessel to receive his party on board 
"as privately as might be." But they were 
betrayed, arrested, stripped of their belongings 
and driven into the town, a spectacle for the 
gaping crowd, then haled before the justices at 
the Guildhall and "put into ward," there to 
await the pleasure of the Privy Council concern- 
ing them. 

Boston is a unique old shrine — a place 
"famihar with forgotten years," as George 
Ehot says; a town, as aheady hinted, resem- 
bhng Gainsborough in many outward features, 
but even wealthier in associations dear to the 
hearts of New World pilgrims. Boston and 
Gainsborough are regarded as the two most 
foreign-looking towns in England. Many of 
Boston's inhabitants still hold the brave spirit 
which enabled their ancestors to endure the re- 
ligious stress of the seventeenth century. It 
has been a cradle of hberty since that idea 
first held men's thoughts and roused them to 
action. 

The quaint buildings, the ancient towers of 
Hussey and of Kyme, the Guildhall, the Gram- 
mar School, the great church with its giant 
tower all crusted o'er with the dust of antiquity: 
these stood when Bradford and Brewster and 
their companions in search of freedom were 
arraigned before the magistrates for the high 
crime and misdemeanor of trying to leave their 
native land. 

They must have had secret friends in the place; 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 23 

for some time after their Boston adventure the 
Government sent down Commissioners to make 
serious inquiry as to who had cut off the crosses 
from the tops of the maces carried before the 
Mayor to church "on Sundays and Thursdays 
and solemn times." John Cotton, the Puritan 
vicar, openly condemned the act. Suspicion 
fell upon churchwarden Atherton Hough. But 
he denied it, though "he confessed he did before 
that year break off the hand and arm of a picture 
of a Pope (as it seemed) standing over a pillar 
of the outside of the steeple very high, which 
hand had the form of a church in it." The 
confession seems to have been safely made, and 
doubtless churchwarden Hough was proud of 
it. He might have been better employed at 
that moment; but if any be tempted to censure 
his Puritan zeal, let them remember the temper 
of the times in which he hved. There was 
something more than wanton mischief behind 
it all. It was not in fact a "picture" of a Pope, 
but an image much more innocent. But the 
resemblance was sufficient for Atherton Hough. 
The venerable Guildhall, where Brewster and 
the rest faced the justices, stands in a street 
containing the queerest of riverside warehouses. 
One of them, old Gysors' Hall, was once the 
home of a family belonging to the merchant 
guilds of Boston, which gave to London two 
Mayors and a Constable of the Tower in the 
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Guild- 
hall itself dates from the thirteenth century; the 



24 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

image of St. Mary which once adorned its front 
shared the fate of the "picture" on the church 
tower, with the difference that the Virgin van- 
ished more completely than the "Pope." The 
hall is regularly used by the pubhc; and local 
authorities with long and honourable history still 
dehberate in the ancient court-room, with its 
wagon roof, its arch beams, its wainscoted walls, 
and the Boston coat-of-arms and the table of 
Boston Mayors since 1545 proudly displayed to 
view. Except for its fittings and furniture the 
chamber presents much the appearance now that 
it did when the Pilgrim Fathers, brought up from 
the cells which exist to-day just as when they 
tenanted them, stood pathetic figures on its floor 
and were interrogated by a body of justices, 
courteous and well-disposed, but powerless to 
give them back their liberty. 




PholoQraph hy Hackford, BokIoii 

The Old Courtroom, Guildhall, Boston 

\\ here the Pilgrims Fathers Jaced the Justices. Iti the floor on the left 

is the trap door to the staircase leading down to the Cells. 

The Court ceased to be held here in 184^ 



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The River 


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— «-^-— _. , -^-* -"^^-iAuy^ 



II 



THE ARREST AT BOSTON AND FLIGHT 
TO HOLLAND 

Well worthy to be magnified are they 

Whoy with sad hearts, of Jriends and country took 

A last farewell, their loved abodes Jorsook, 

And hallowed ground in which their fathers lay. 

Wordsworth. 

GREAT things were destined to result 
from that none too joyous jaunt of 
Elder Brewster's when, late in 1607, 
charged by the Scrooby community to find them 
a way out of England, he went down to Bos- 
ton and chartered a ship. William Bradford 
was of the Boston party. Everything was 
quietly done. In all likelihood the intending 
emigrants never entered the town, but gathered 
at some convenient spot on the Witham tidal 
estuary where the rushing JEgir hissed. 

Whether the Dutch skipper was dissatisfied 
with the fare promised him, or he feared detec- 
tion and punishment, cannot be told. Yet, 
when the fugitives were all on board his vessel, 
and appeared about to sail, they were arrested 
by minions of the law. Bitter must have been 
their disappointment; stern, we may be sure, 
their remonstrance. But they could do nothing 
more than upbraid the treacherous Dutchman. 
31 



32 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

They were not kept long in doubt as to their 
fate. Put back into open boats, their captors 
"rifled and ransacked them, searching them to 
their shirts for money, yea, even the women 
further than became modesty, and then carried 
them back into the town, and made them a 
spectacle and wonder to the multitude who 
came flocking on all sides to behold them." A 
goodly sight for this curious Boston mob. ** Be- 
ing thus first by the catchpole officers rifled and 
stripped of their money, books, and much other 
goods," proceeds the account, with an honest 
contempt for the writings of the law, "they 
were presented to the magistrates, and messen- 
gers were sent to inform the Lords of the Coun- 
cil of them; and so they were committed to 
ward." 

The basement cells in which the prisoners 
were placed had been in use at that time for 
about sixty years, for "in 1552 it was ordered 
that the kitchens under the Town Hall and the 
chambers over them should be prepared for a 
prison and a dwelhng-house for one of the ser- 
geants." There must have been more cells 
formerty. Two of them now remain. They 
are entered by a step some eighteen inches high; 
are about six feet broad by seven feet long; 
and in heu of doors they are made secure by a 
barred iron gate. 

Into these dens the captives were thrust. 
Short of a dungeon underground, no place of 
confinement could have been more depressing. 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 35 

Only the heavy whitewashed gate, scarce wide 
enough to allow a man to enter, admits the hght 
and air; and the interior of each cell is dark as 
night. We can imagine the misery of men 
fated to inhabit for long such abodes of gloom; 
it must have been extreme. They look as if 
they might have served as coal cellars for feeding 
the great open fireplaces which, with their spits 
and jacks and winding-chains, still stand there 
in the long open kitchen much as they did when 
they cooked the last mayoral banquet or May 
Day dinner for the old Bostonians. 

A curious winding stair (partly left with its 
post), terminating at a trapdoor in the court- 
room floor, was the way by which prisoners as- 
cended and descended on their passage to and 
from the Court above. 

Now these justices who had the dealing with 
the Pilgrim Fathers were humane men, and 
were not without a feeling of sympathy for the 
unhappy captives. It is therefore reasonable 
to suppose that during some portion of this 
time, when their presence was not required by 
the Court, they may have found them better 
quarters than the Guildhall cells. There was 
a roomy ramshackle pile near the church in the 
market-place, half shop, half jail, of irregular 
shape, with long low roof, which in 1584 was 
"made strong" as regards the prison part, 
though in 1603 — four years before the date 
under notice — it was so insecure that an indi- 
vidual detained there was "ordered to have irons 



36 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

placed upon him for his more safe keeping," 
with a watchman to look after him! And 
thirty years later the jail, "and the prison 
therein called Little-Ease,'* were repaired. 

We know what "Little-Ease" means well 
enough; and so did many a wretched occupant 
of these barbarous places. The Bishop of 
Lincoln, in the old persecuting days, had at his 
palace at Woburn "a cell in his prison called 
Little-Ease," so named because it was so small 
that those confined in it could neither stand 
upright nor He at length. Other bishops pos- 
sessed similar means of bodily correction and 
spiritual persuasion. 

This was worse than the Guildhall cells, with 
all their gloomy horror; and if the magistrates 
entertained their unwilling guests at the town 
jail, we may rest satisfied they did not eat the 
bread of adversity and drink the water of afflic- 
tion in Little-Ease, but in some more spacious 
apartment. We have no evidence that they 
did so entertain them, and the traditional lodg- 
ing-place of these intercepted Pilgrims is the 
Guildhall and nowhere else. It is probable, all 
the same, that a good part of their captivity 
was spent in the town prison. 

Although the magistrates, from Mayor John 
Mayson downward, felt for the sufferers and 
doubtless ameliorated their condition as far 
as they could, it was not until after a month's 
imprisonment that the greater part were dis- 
missed and sent back, baffled, plundered, and 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 



39 



heart-broken, to the places they had so lately 
left, there to endure the scoffs of their neighbours 
and the rigours of ecclesiastical discipline. 

Seven of the principal men, treated as ring- 
leaders, were kept in prison and bound over to 
the assizes. Apparently nothing further was 
done with them. Brewster is said to have been 
the chief sufferer both in person and pocket. 
He had eluded a warrant by leaving for Boston, 
and we know this was in September, because on 
the fifteenth of that month the messenger charged 
to apprehend Brewster and another man, one 
Richard Jackson of Scrooby, certified to the 
Ecclesiastical Court at York "that he cannot 
find them, nor understand where they are." 
On the thirtieth of September also the first 
payment is recorded to Brewster's successor as 
postmaster at Scrooby. 

How the imprisoned Separatists fared, there 
is nothing to show. No assize record exists. 
The Privy Council Register, which could have 
thrown fight on the matter, was destroyed in 
the Whitehall fire of 1618; and the Boston Cor- 
poration records, which doubtless contained 
some entry on the subject that would have been 
of the greatest interest now, are also disappoint- 
ing, as the leaves for the period, the first of a 
volume, have disappeared. 

Eventually the prisoners were all fiberated. 
That dreary wait of many weeks was a weari- 
ness of the spirit and of the flesh. Patiently 
they bore the separation, and by and by they 



40 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

met to make more plans. Next spring they 
agreed with another Dutchman to take them on 
board at a lonely point on the northern coast of 
Lincolnshire, between Grimsby and Hull, *' where 
was a large common, a good way distant from 
any town." This spot has been located as 
Immingham, the site of the new Grimsby docks. 

The women, with the children and their goods, 
came to the Humber by boat down the Trent 
from Gainsborough; the men travelled forty 
miles across country from Scrooby. Both par- 
ties got to the rendezvous before the ship, and 
the boat was run into a creek. This was unfor- 
tunate, as when the captain came on the scene 
next morning the boat was high and dry, left 
on the mud by the fallen tide, and there was 
nothing for it but to wait for high water at 
midday. 

Meanwhile the Dutchman set about taking 
the men on board in the ship's skiff, but when 
one boatload had been embarked he saw to his 
dismay, out on the hills in hot pursuit, "a great 
company, both horse and foot, with bills and 
guns and other weapons," for ''the country was 
raised to take them." So the laconic historian 
says, "he swore his country's oath — Sacra- 
mente," and heaving up his anchor sailed straight 
away with the people he had got. Their feehngs 
may be imagined; and their plight was aggra- 
vated by a violent storm, which drove them out 
of their course and tossed them about for a 
fortnight, until even the sailors gave up hope 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 43 

and abandoned themselves to despair. But 
the ship reached port at last, and all were 
saved. 

The scene ashore meantime had been scarcely 
less distressing than that at sea. Some of the 
men left behind made good their escape; 
the rest tarried with the forsaken portion of 
the party. The women were broken-hearted. 
Some wept and cried for their husbands, carried 
away in the unkindly prudent Dutchman's 
ship. Some were distracted with apprehension; 
and others looked with tearful eyes into the 
faces of the helpless little ones that clung about 
them, crying with fear and quaking with cold. 

The men with the bills and guns arrested them ; 
but, though they hurried their prisoners from 
place to place, no justice could be found to send 
women to gaol for no other crime than wanting 
to go with their husbands. We know not what 
befell them. The most hkely suggestion is that 
"they took divers ways, and were received into 
various houses by kind-hearted country folk.'* 
Yet this we do know. They ralhed somewhere 
at a later day, and John Robinson and WilHam 
Brewster, and other principal members of the 
devoted sect, including Richard Clyfton, "were 
of the last, and stayed to help the weakest over 
before them;" and Bradford tells us with a sigh 
of satisfaction that "notwithstanding all these 
storms of opposition, they all gatt over at length, 
some at one time and some at another, and some 
in one place and some in another, and mette 



44 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

togeather againe according to their desires, with 
no small rejoycing" — to take part in the 
wonderful movement, begun by the Pilgrims 
and continued by the Puritans, that gave to a 
new land a new nation. Thus, wrote Richard 
Monckton Milnes, in some verses dated **The 
Hall, Bawtry, May 30th, 1854" — 

Thus, to men cast in that heroic mould 

Came Empire, such as Spaniard never knew — 
Such Empire as beseems the just and true; 

And at the last, almost unsought, came gold. 




Copyriyht, 1904. by A. S. Burhank, Pli/moulh 

Elder William Brewster 



Ill 



LIFE IN LEYDEN — ADIEU TO 

PLYMOUTH— THE VOYAGE 

TO THE WEST 




Photograph by W. P. Demmenie, Leyden 

John Robinson's House, Leyden, where the Pilgrim 
Fathers Worshipped 




Ill 

LIFE IN LEYDEN — ADIEU TO PLYM- 
OUTH—THE VOYAGE TO THE WEST 

Then to the new-found World explored their way. 
That so a Church, unforced, uncalled to brook 
Ritual restraints, within some sheltering nook 
Her Lord might worship and His Word obey 
In Freedom. — Wordsworth. 

^HE first Stage of the pilgrimage from 
the Old England to the New was now 

^]^ accomplished. Before the end of 1608 
the whole body of the fugitives had assembled 
at Amsterdam. Two Separatist communities 
were already there, one from London, of which 
Francis Johnson was pastor and Henry Ains- 
' worth teacher, and the other from Gainsborough 
under John Smyth. But these brethren were 
torn with dissensions, and the Scrooby Pilgrims, 
seeking peace, moved on to Leyden, where, by 
permission of the authorities, they settled early 
in 1609. Here they embarked upon a prosperous 
period of church hfe, and after awhile purchased 
a large dwelhng, standing near the belfry tower 
of St. Peter's Church, which in 161 1 served as 
pastor's residence and meeting-house, while in 
the rear of it were built a score of cottages for 
the use of their poor. 

Eleven quiet years were spent in Holland. 
51 



52 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

Governor Bradford says they continued "in a 
comfortable condition, enjoying much sweet and 
delightful society and spiritual comfort," and 
that they "lived together in love and peace all 
their days," without any difference or disturb- 
ance "but such as was easily healed in love." 

The conditions of hfe were stern and hard, 
but they bore all cheerfully. With patient in- 
dustry they worked at various handicrafts, 
fighting poverty and gaining friends. Wilham 
Bradford was a fustian worker when, in 1613, at 
the age of twenty-three, he married Dorothy May 
of Wisbech; the marriage register which thus de- 
scribes him is preserved in the Puiboeken at 
Amsterdam. Brewster, who was chief elder to 
John Robinson, now sole pastor of the congre- 
gation since Richard Clyfton had remained 
behind at Amsterdam, at first earned a liveli- 
hood by giving lessons in English to the students 
at the University. Then, in conjunction with 
Thomas Brewer, a Puritan from Kent, he set 
up a printing press, and they produced books 
in defence of their principles, such as were banned 
in England. Similar literature, emanating from 
the Netherlands, had excited the wrath of King 
James, who still possessed sufficient influence 
with the States of Holland to enable him to 
reach offending authors there. This James 
attempted to do in the case of Elder Brewster 
through Sir Dudley Carleton, then Enghsh 
ambassador at the Hague. The result was 
ludicrous failure. 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 33 

Brewster quitted Leyden for a time and went 
to London, not as was thought to elude the 
vigilance of the Ambassador, but to arrange with 
shipmasters for a voyage to the West, which 
the Pilgrims had begun to think about. While 
Brewster was being sought by the Bishop of 
London's pursuivants. Sir Dudley Carleton, 
unaware of the hunt proceeding in London, was 
actively searching for him at Leyden, and at 
last triumphantly informed Secretary Naunton 
that he had caught his man. But as it turned 
out, the baihff charged with the arrest, "being 
a dull, drunken fellow," had seized Brewer 
instead of Brewster! The prisoner was never- 
theless detained, and after some ado consented 
to submit himself for examination in England, 
on conditions which were observed. Nothing 
came of it however. Brewster returned free 
and unmolested and Brewer remained in Leyden 
for some years, when, venturing back to England, 
he was thrown into prison and kept there until 
released by the Long Parhament fourteen years 
later. 

Events were meanwhile shaping the destiny 
of the little Pilgrim community. Holland, 
though a welcome temporary asylum, was no 
permanent place for these English exiles, and 
their thoughts turned before long towards a 
settlement in North America. By good fortune 
this was a country then being opened up, and 
it appeared as a veritable Land of Promise to 
these refugees in search of a new home. 



^'^■^^^*£^S^'^^Wy 



56 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

The first attempt to found an English colony 
on the mainland of North America was made 
in 1584, when Sir Walter Raleigh took possession 
of the country and named it Virginia in honour 
of his Queen. Nothing came of this venture, 
but in 1607 a company of one hundred and five 
men from England, saihng in three small ships, 
had landed on the peninsula of Jamestown in 
Chesapeake Bay, and the first permanent settle- 
ment was estabhshed. 

The chief of this Virginian enterprise was the 
redoubtable John Smith, a Lincolnshire man, 
the first of those sons of empire to go out from 
the East to the West. Strange that this pioneer 
in the wilderness, who gave to New England its 
name, should have come from a country which 
was to contribute so much to the peophng of the 
New England States. It is upon record that 
in 1 61 9 Smith, who was then unemployed at 
home, volunteered to lead out the Pilgrims to 
North Virginia, but nothing came of the offer. 

The Leyden brethren in their hour of need 
turned to the Virginia Company, and the nego- 
tiations for a settlement in the chartered territory 
were not altogether unsatisfactory. The obsta- 
cle was their rehgion. On the Council of the 
Company they had good friends; but its charter 
not only enforced conformity, but provided 
stringent measures of church government. Yet, 
though the Pilgrims could obtain no formal 
grant of freedom of worship, the presumption 
that they would not be disturbed was so strong 



11 



1! 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 59 

that they accepted the conditions and were 
about to embark when the Merchant Adven- 
turers in London with whom they were associated 
secured powers from the Plymouth Company, 
and they decided to sail for New England 
instead of for Virginia. 

Arrangements were not completed without 
"many quirimonies and complaints;" but the 
exiles were saddled with such substantial diffi- 
culties as want of capital and means of transport, 
and the bargaining was all in favour of the mer- 
chants who were to finance and equip the expe- 
dition. At length the compact was made and 
preparations for the voyage were pushed for- 
ward, and the eventful day arrived when the 
Pilgrims were to make the long, lone journey 
across the seas. 

Pastor Robinson and a portion of his flock 
were to stay behind at Leyden until the first 
detachment had secured a lodgment on the 
American continent; and those about to sail, 
the majority of the little community, went on 
board the Speedwell, a vessel of sixty tons. 
The Pilgrims embarked included such stout- 
hearted pioneers as Brewster and Bradford, 
John Carver, Edward Winslow, Isaac Allerton, 
Samuel Fuller, and John Howland, all "pious 
and godly men;" also Captain Miles Standish, 
who, though not a member of the congregation 
then or afterwards, was a valiant soldier whose 
military experience and well-tried sword would, 
it was suspected, prove of service in a country 



6o THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

where "salvages** were known to exist in large 
numbers and might have to be encountered with 
the arm of flesh. 

That was a touching scene and one which 
stands out boldly in the history of the movement 
when, on a bright sunny morning in July, 1620, 
the Pilgrim Fathers knelt on the seashore at 
Delfshaven and Mr. Robinson, his hands up- 
lifted and his voice broken with emotion, gave 
them his blessing. Aff'ecting also was the parting 
of the emigrants with those they were leaving 
behind. They had need of all their courage and 
patience. 

They sailed with British cheers and a sounding 
volley fired as salute, and made a brave enough 
show on quitting land; but troubles dogged 
them on the waters. Delays and disappoint- 
ments soon set in. The Speedwefl brought them 
to Southampton, where, anchored ofl" the West 
Key, they found the Mayflower of London, a 
bark of one hundred and eighty tons burden, 
Captain Thomas Jones, and several passengers, 
some of them merchants' craftsmen. 

Here some anxious days were spent in patch- 
ing up the compact with the Adventurers, and 
while the vessels lay detained letters written by 
Robinson arrived from Leyden, one for John 
Carver conveying the pastoral promise — never, 
alas! redeemed — to join them later, and the 
other, fufl of wise counsel and encouragement, 
addressed to the whole company, to whom it 
was read aloud and "had good acceptance with 
all and after-fruit with many." 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 63 

With ninety people in the Mayflower and 
thirty in the Speedwell, and a governor and 
assistants appointed for each company, the two 
vessels dropped down Southampton water on 
August 15^; but they were scarcely in the 
Channel when the smaller craft began to leak, 
and they had to run into Dartmouth and over- 
haul her. The repairs occupied eight days. 
At the end of that time the ships again stood 
out to sea; but, when nearly three hundred miles 
past the Land's End, Reynolds, master of the 
Speedwefl, reported that the pinnace was still 
leaking badly, and could only be kept afloat by 
the aid of the pumps. So there was nothing 
for it but to turn back a second time, and the 
vessels now put into Plymouth, the Pilgrims 
landing at the Old Barbican. 

At Plymouth the Speedwefl was abandoned 
and sent back to London to the Merchant 
Adventurers, and with her went eighteen per- 
sons who had turned faint-hearted, among them 
Robert Cushman, a chief promoter of the emi- 
gration, and his famfly. Finafly, after much 
kindness and hospitality extended to them by 
the Plymouth people, of whom they carried a 
grateful remembrance across the Atlantic, the 
Pilgrim Fathers said adieu, and afl crowded on 
board the Mayflower, which, with its load of 
passengers, numbering one hundred and two 
souls, foflowed by many a cheering shout and 

^ New style, which is that adopted for the dates of 
sailing, and arrival and landing in North American. 



64 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

fervent "God-speed" from the shore, set sail 
alone on September i6 on its dreary voyage to 
the West. The weighing of the anchor of that 
little ship changed the ultimate destiny of half 
the Enghsh-speaking race! 

We have to remember that a trip like this in 
such a vessel as the Mayflower, crowded for the 
most part with helpless people, was a hazard- 
ous undertaking. The dangers of the deep were 
dreaded in those days for all-sufficient reasons, 
and here was a tiny craft, heavily submerged, 
making a winter voyage on a stormy ocean to 
a destination almost unknown. It must have 
required the strongest resolution, both of passen- 
gers and crew, to face the perils of the venture; 
the step was a desperate one, but, urged on by 
circumstances and an indomitable spirit, they 
took it unfalteringly, having first done what 
they could to make the lumbering little ship 
seaworthy. 

The weather was cold and tempestuous, and 
the passage unexpectedly long. Half way across 
the Atlantic the voyagers incurred the penalty 
of those early delays, which now left them still 
at sea in the bad season. Caught by the equi- 
noctial gales, they were sadly buffeted about, 
driven hither and thither by boisterous winds, 
tossed hke a toy on the face of great roffing, 
breaking biHows, the decks swept, masts and 
timbers creaking, the rigging rattling in the hard 
northern blast. One of the violent seas which 
struck them, unshipped a large beam in the body 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 67 

of the vessel, but by strenuous labour it was got 
into position again, and the carpenters caulked 
the seams which the pitching had opened in the 
sides and deck. Once that sturdy colonist of 
later years, John Rowland, venturing above the 
gratings, was washed overboard, but by a lucky 
chance he caught a coil of rope trailing over 
the bulwark in the sea, and was hauled back into 
the ship. A birth and a death at intervals were 
also events of the passage. It was not until 
two whole months had been spent on the troubled 
ocean that glad cries at last welcomed the sight 
of land, and very soon after, on November 21, 
sixty-seven days out from Plymouth, the May- 
flower rounded Cape Cod and dropped anchor 
in the placid waters of what came to be Province- 
town Harbour. 



IV 

•*INTO A WORLD UNKNOWN" 
TRIALS AND TRIUMPH 



IV 




INTO A WORLD UNKNOWN" — 
TRIALS AND TRIUMPH 

The breaking waves dasb'd bigb 

On a stem and rock-bound coast; 
And the woods, against a stormy sky, 

Tbeir giant branches toss'd. — Mrs. Hemans. 

'E can imagine with what wondering awe 
and mingled hopes and fears the Pil- 
grims looked out over the sea upon 
that strange New World, with its great stretch 
of wild, wooded coast and panorama of rock and 
dune and scrub, wintry bay and frowning head- 
land, to which destiny and the worn white wings 
of the Mayflower together had brought them. 
With thankful hearts for safe dehverance from 
the perils of the sea, mindful of the past and not 
despairing for the future, they turned trustfully 
and bravely to meet the dangers which they 
knew awaited them in the unknown wilderness 
ashore. 

The point reached by the voyagers was con- 
siderably north of the intended place of settle- 
ment, the vicinity of the Hudson River; but 
whether accidental or designed — and some 
evidence there certainly was which seemed to 
show that the master of the Mayflower had been 

7$ 



76 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

bribed by the Dutch ^ to keep away from Man- 
hattan, which they wanted for themselves — the 
variation was a happy one for the colonists, in- 
asmuch as it saved them from the savages, who 
were warlike and numerous near the Hudson, 
while in this district they had been decimated 
and scattered by disease. 

Now the Pilgrims were a prudent as well as 
a pious and plucky people, and while yet upon 
the water they set about providing themselves 
with a system of civil government. Placed as 
they were by this time outside the pale of recog- 
nized authority, some fitting substitute for it 
must be estabhshed if order was to be maintained. 
The necessity for this was the more impera- 
tive as there were some on board — the hired 
labourers, probably — who were not, it was 
feared, "well affected to peace and concord." 
Assembled in the cabin of the Mayflower, we 
accordingly have the leaders of the expedition, 
preparing that other historical incident of the 
pilgrimage. There they drew up the document 
forming a body politic and promising obedience 
to laws framed for the common good. This was 
the first American charter of self-government. 
It was subscribed by all the male emigrants on 
board, numbering forty-one. Under the consti- 

^ Morton in his "New England's Memorial," declares 
that the Dutch fraudulently hired the captain of the 
Mayflower to steer to the north of what is now New 
York, and adds: "Of this plot between the Dutch and 
Mr. Jones I have had late and certain information." 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 79 

tution adopted, John Carver was elected Gov- 
ernor for one year. 

The Mayflower rode at anchor while three 
explorations were made to discover a suitable 
place of settlement, one of them on shore under 
Captain Miles Standish, and two by water in 
the ship's shallop, which had been stowed away 
in pieces 'tween decks on the voyage. On 
December 21st an inlet of the bay was sounded 
and pronounced "fit for shipping," and the 
explorers on going inland found "divers corn- 
fields and Kttle running brooks," and other 
promising sources of supply. They accordingly 
decided that this was a place "fit for situation," 
and on December 26th the Mayflower's passen- 
gers, cramped and emaciated by long confine- 
ment on board, leaped joyfully ashore. Appro- 
priately the spot was named New Plymouth, 
after the last port of call in Old England. 

The Pilgrims landed on a huge boulder of 
granite, the Pilgrim Stone, still reverently pre- 
served by their descendants: a rock which was 

to their feet as a doorstep 
Into a world unknown — the cornerstone of a nation! * 

The early struggles of the Plymouth planters 
and the hardships they endured form a story 
of terrible privation and suffering on the one 
hand and heroic endurance and self-sacrifice 
on the other. They were late in arriving, and 
the season, midwinter, was unpropitious. The 

^ Lx)ngfeIIow, "The Courtship of Miles Standish." 






8o THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 




weather was unusually severe, even for that 
rigorous climate, and the Pilgrims found them- 
selves in sorry plight on that bleak New England 
shore. Cold and famine had doggedly to be 
fought, and the contest was an unequal one. 
Cooped up for so long in the Mayflower, and 
badly fed and sheltered on the voyage, the 
settlers were ill-fitted to withstand the stress of 
the new conditions. For a time it was a struggle 
for bare existence, and the little colony was 
brought very near to extinction. 

The first care was to provide accommodation 
ashore, and for economy of building the com- 
munity was divided into nineteen households, 
and the single men assigned to the different 
families, each of whom was to erect its own 
habitation and to have a plot of land. These 
rude homesteads of wood and thatch, and other 
buildings, eventually formed a single street 
beside the stream running down to the beach 
from the hill beyond. The soil of the chosen 
settlement appeared to be good, and abounded 
with "delicate springs" of water; the land 
yielded plentifully in season, and life teemed 
upon the coast and in the sea. 

But many of the Pilgrims never lived to enjoy 
this provision of a bountiful Providence. Worn 
out, enfeebled in health, insufficiently housed 
ashore, they were a prey to sickness. Death 
reaped a rich harvest in their midst. Every 
second day a grave had to be dug for one or 
other of them in the frozen ground. Sometimes, 



tu 




Cupyriyhl. 190fi, by A. S. Burtxmk, Plymouth 

The Canopv over Plymouth Rock 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 83 

during January and February, two or three died 
in a single day. So rapid was the mortality 
that at last only a mere handful remained who 
were able to look after the sick. William 
Bradford was at this time prostrated, and it is 
pathetic to note the expression of his gratitude to 
his friend WiKiam Brewster and Miles Standish 
and others who ministered to his needs and those 
of the fellow-sufFerers around him. One house, 
the first finished, was set apart as a hospital. 
The hill above the beach was converted into a 
burial-ground, 1 and one is touched to the quick 
to read of the graves having to be levelled and 
grassed over for fear the prowling Indians should 
discover how few and weak the strangers were 
becoming! 

With March came better weather, and for 
the first time "the birds sang pleasantly in the 
woods," and brought hope and gladness to the 
hearts of the struggfing colonists. But, by 
that time, of the hundred or more who had 
landed three short months before, one-half had 
perished miserably. John Carver succumbed 
in April, and his wife quickly followed him to 

^ This is the Cole's Hill of the present day, the spot 
where half the Mayflower Pilgrims found their rest during 
the first winter. Five of their graves were discovered in 
1855, while pipes for the town's waterworks were being 
laid, and two more (now marked with a granite slab), in 
1883. The bones of the first five are deposited in a 
compartment of the granite canopy which covers the 
"Forefathers' Rock" on which the Pilgrim Fathers 
landed. 



84 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

the grave. Bradford, by the suffrages of his 
brethren, was made Governor for the first time 
in Carver's place. He had himself sustained a 
heavy bereavement, for, while he was away in 
the shallop with the exploring party, Dorothy 
May, the wife he had married at Amsterdam, 
fell overboard and was drowned. Many men 
of the Mayflower also died that dreadful winter 
as the ship lay at anchor in the bay, including 
the boatswain, the gunner, and the cook, three 
quartermasters and several seamen. 

To other troubles were aUied the ever menacing 
peril of the Indians, which resulted in the famous 
challenge of the bundle of arrows wrapped in a 
rattlesnake's skin, and Bradford's effective reply 
to it with a serpent's skin stuffed with powder 
and shot; also, less happily, that return of Miles 
Standish and his men bearing in triumph a 
sagamore's head; and the building of the hill- 
fort, with cannon brought ashore from the May- 
flower mounted on its roof, where also they 
worshipped till the first church was built at the 
hifl fort in 1648. Here it was that the Pilgrims 
perpetuated the church founded at Scrooby in 
England. A building erected for storage and 
public worship in the first days of the colony 
took fire soon after its completion and was 
burnt to the ground. Of the refuge on the hifl 
Bradford writes: "They builte a fort with good 
timber, both strong and comly, which was of 
good defence, made with a flatte rofe and batil- 
ments, on which their ordnance was mounted. 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 87 

and where they kepte constante watch, especially 
in time of danger. It served them also for a 
meeting-house, and was fitted accordingly for 
that use." The fort was large and square, and 
a work of such pretentions as to be regarded by 
some of the Pilgrims as vainglorious. Its provi- 
sion was fully justified by the dangers which 
threatened the settlers, and it became the center 
of both the civic and rehgious Hfe of the httle 
colony. 

An excellent idea of the scene at Sunday 
church parade is given in a letter^ written by 
Isaac de Rassieres, secretary to the Dutch colony 
estabhshed at Manhattan, the modern New 
York, in 1623, describing a visit he paid to the 
Plymouth Plantation in the autumn of 1627. 
After speaking of the flat-roofed fort with its 
"six cannon, which shoot iron balls of four and 
five pounds and command the surrounding 
country," the writer says of the Pilgrims meeting 
in the lower part: "They assemble by beat of 
drum, each with his musket or firelock, in front 
of the captain's door; they have their cloaks on, 
and place themselves in order three abreast, 
and are led by a sergeant without beat of drum. 
Behind comes the Governor in a long robe; 
beside him, on the right hand, comes the Preacher 
with his cloak on, and on the left the Captain 

^ The letter was addressed by De Rassieres to Herr 
Blommaert, a director of his company, after his return 
to Holland, where the Royal Library became possessed 
of it in 1847. 







88 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

with his sidearms and cloak on, and with a small 
cane in his hand; and so they march in good 
order, and each sets his arms down near him. 
Thus they are constantly on their guard, night 
and day." 

The spectacle may not have been strictly 
that witnessed at every service on ** Sundays 
and the usual holidays," for this was a state 
visit to the Colony, with solemn entry and her- 
alding by trumpeters, and the Pilgrims probably 
treated the occasion with more form than was 
their wont. Still it is an instructive picture, 
full of romantic suggestion. 

And then the service itself. For some notion 
of this we must turn to a visit paid to the Planta- 
tion five years later, in the autumn of 1632, 
when we are introduced to another scene in the 
fortified church. From the "Life and Letters" 
of John Winthrop, Governor of the neighbouring 
Colony of Massachusetts Bay, we gather that, 
at the time stated, Winthrop and his pastor, 
John Wilson, came over to Plymouth, walking 
the twenty-five miles. **0n the Lord's Day," 
we read, ''there was a sacrament, which they 
did partake in." Roger Wilhams was there as 
assistant to Ralph Smith, the first minister of 
Plymouth church, and in the afternoon WilHams, 
according to custom, "propounded a question," 
to which Mr. Smith "spake briefly." Then 
Mr. Wilhams "prophesied," that is he preached, 
"and after, the Governor of Plymouth spake to 
the question; after him. Elder Brewster; then 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 91 

some two or three men of the congregation. 
Then Elder Brewster desired the Governor of 
Massachusetts and Mr. Wilson to speak to it, 
which they did. When this was ended the 
deacon, Mr. Fuller, put the congregation in 
mind of their duty of contribution; whereupon 
the Governor and all the rest went down to 
the deacon's seat, and put into the box, and 
then returned.** 

There is nothing here about the music of the 
services, such as it was, vocal only, rugged, but 
not without melody. We know, however, that 
the Pilgrims used that psalter, brought over by 
them to New England, with its tunes printed 
above each psalm in lozenge-shaped Ehzabethan 
notes, which Longfellow so grandly describes in 
"The Courtship of Miles Standish*' as 

the well-worn psalm-book of Ainsworth, 
Printed in Amsterdam, the words and the music together. 
Rough-hewn, angular notes, like stones in the walls 

of a churchyard, 
Darkened and overhung by the running vine of the verses. 

The duty of "tuning the Psalm,** as they 
designated the performance, in the young colo- 
nial days, before choirs or precentors were 
dreamt of, was delegated to some lusty-Iunged 
brother present, and, judged by the testimony 
which has come down to us, it was an onerous 
one, trying to his patience and his vocal power 
when, as sometimes happened, the congregation 
carried another tune against him. They were 
called to Sabbath worship in the earlier times by 



92 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

sound of horn or beat of drum or the blowing 
of a large conch-shell. At Plymouth we have 
seen it was by drum beat, probably from the 
roof, that the people were assembled at the 
meeting-house. 

When the Mayflower left them to return 
home in the spring, the settlers must have felt 
they were desolate indeed, for their nearest 
civihsed neighbours were five hundred miles to 
the north and south of them, the French at 
Nova Scotia and the Enghsh in Virginia. Seven 
months later, in November, came the Fortune, 
bringing thirty-five new emigrants, including 
William Brewster's eldest son; John Winslow, 
a brother of Edward; and Robert Cushman, 
who had turned back the year before at Old 
Plymouth. In addition to her passengers, the 
Fortune brought out to the colonists, from the 
Council of New England, a patent ^ of their 
land, drawn up in the name of John Pierce and 
his associate Merchant Adventurers in the same 
way as the charter granted them by the Plym- 
outh Company on February 21, 1620, author- 
ising the planters to establish their colony near 
the mouth of the Hudson river. 

^ This document, preserved still in the Pilgrim Hall at 
Plymouth, is dated June i, 1621, and bears the signa- 
tures and seals of the Duke of Lenox, the Marquis of 
Hamilton, the Earl of Warwick, and Sir Ferdinand© 
Gorges, a name for many years prominent in American 
history. The patent only remained in force a year. 
That issued by the Council eight years later was trans- 
ferred by Governor Bradford to the General Court in 1640. 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 95 

When the Fortune sailed back to England, 
she carried a cargo of merchandise valued at 
five hundred pounds. This was intended for 
the Adventurers, but they never received it, for 
when nearing port, the vessel was captured by 
the French and the cargo seized. The ship was 
allowed to proceed, and Cushman, who returned 
in her, secured the papers on board, among them 
Bradford and Winslow's Journal, known as 
Mourt's Relation, and a letter from Edward 
Winslow to his "loving and old friend" George 
Morton, who was about to come out, giving 
seasonable advice as to what he and his com- 
panions should bring with them — good store 
of clothes and bedding, and each man a musket 
and fowhng-piece; paper and hnseed oil for 
the making of their windows (glass being then 
too great a luxury for a New England home), 
and much store of powder and shot. 

Soon arrived further parties from Leyden and 
stores from the Adventurers in London in the 
Anne and the Little James pinnace, the people 
including such welcome additions as Brewster's 
two daughters. Fear and Patience; George Mor- 
ton and his household; Mrs. Samuel Fuller; 
Ahce Carpenter, widow of Edward Southworth, 
afterwards the second wife of Governor Bradford; 
and Barbara, who married Miles Standish. 
Then from the Leyden pastor came letters for 
Bradford and Brewster. The writer was dead 
— had been dead a year — when those letters 
reached their destination, but this they only 



96 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

knew when Stanclish gave them the tidings on 
his return from a voyage to England. John 
Robinson passed away at the age of forty-nine 
on March i, 1622, in the old meeting-house at 
Leyden, and they buried him under the pavement 
of St. Peter's Church. Brewster lost his wife 
about the time the sad news was known, and the 
messenger who brought it had further to tell of 
the death of Robert Cushman. Truly the tale 
of affliction was a sore one. 

By the July of 1623 a total of about two hun- 
dred and thirty-three persons had been brought 
out, including the children and servants, of whom 
one hundred and two, composed of seventy-three 
males and twenty-nine females, eighteen of the 
latter wives, were landed from the Mayflower. 
At the close of that year not more than one 
hundred and eighty-three were living. The 
survivors bravely persevered. Gradually the 
Pilgrim Colony took deep root. The New 
Plymouth men were a steady, plodding set, and 
the soil, if hard, was tenacious. They got a 
firm foothold. They suffered much, for their 
trials by no means ended with the first winter; 
but their cheerful trust in Providence and in 
their own final triumph never wavered. By 
1628 their position was secure beyond all doubt 
or question. The way was now prepared; the 
tide of emigration set in ; and the main body of 
the Puritans began to follow in the track of their 
courageous and devoted advance-guard. 

Out there in the West these Pilgrims, or first- 




Copyright, lOO;, l,j .(. .S-. Burhank, PijmuulK 

Captain Miles Standish 



i ti.mmt-i' I ¥1 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 99 

comers, settled themselves resolutely to the task 
which lay before them. They were no idle 
dreamers, though their ideahsm was intense, 
and they were united by the bonds of sympathy 
and helpfulness, one towards another. Their 
works were humble, their hves simple and 
obscure, their worldly success but small, their 
fears many and pressing, and their vision of the 
future restricted and dim. But they consist- 
ently put into practise the conceptions and 
ideals which dominated them and were to be 
the inheritance of the great Republic they un- 
consciously initiated and helped to build up. 
They established a community and a govern- 
ment sohdly founded on love of freedom and 
behef in progress, on civil Hberty and religious 
toleration, on industrial cooperation and individ- 
ual honesty and industry, on even-handed justice 
and a real equality before the laws, on peace and 
goodwill supported by protective force. They 
were more hberal and tolerant in rehgion than 
the Puritan colonists of Massachusetts Bay, and 
more merciful in their punishments; they per- 
petrated no atrocities against inferior peoples, 
and cherished the love of peace and of political 
justice. 

Although at first the relations of the Pilgrims 
with their Puritan neighbours were none of the 
best, a better state of feehng before long pre- 
vailed. We have seen how John Winthrop and 
his pastor plodded over to Plymouth to attend 
its Sunday worship. Three years earlier, in 



100 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

1629, Bradford and some of his brethren went 
by sea to Salem to an ordination service there, 
and, says Morton in his ** Memorial," "gave 
them the right hand of fellowship." There were 
other visits, letters of friendship, and reciprocal 
acts of kindness. We read of Samuel Fuller, 
physician and deacon, going to Salem to tend 
the sick, and of Governor Winthrop lending 
Plymouth in its need twenty-eight pounds of 
gunpowder. 

This good feeling strengthened as time went 
on, and drew together the Plantations of Plym- 
outh, Massachusetts, and Connecticut for mu- 
tual support and protection; and in May, 1643, 
the deputies of these Colonies, meeting at 
Boston, subscribed the Articles of Confederation 
which created the first Federal Union in America. 
This league prospered well until 1684, when the 
Colonial charter was annulled and a Crown 
Colony was established under an English gover- 
nor. Less than a decade later Massachusetts 
became a Royal province, and that period in 
American history was entered upon which ended 
with the Declaration of Independence and the 
creation of the United States. 

While the federation of 1643 ^^^ much for the 
United Colonies, it overshadowed, but could not 
obscure, Plymouth and the unique annals and 
traditions which have preserved for it a foremost 
place in all American history. With the order 
of things inaugurated in 1692 the body politic 
framed by the men of the Mayflower ceased to 




Copuriyht, 1004, by A. S. Burhank, Plymouth 

GoNERNOR William Bradford 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 



03 



have separate existence, but it remains deep in 
the foundations of the nation which absorbed it. 
In the modest language of Wilham Bradford 
used in his day, "As one small candle may hght 
a thousand, so the hght here kindled hath shone 
to many, yea, in some sort to our whole nation," 
a truth which has a far wider apphcation now 
than it had in Bradford's time. 



Such is the story of the Mayflower Pilgrims, 
romantic, heroic, idylhc, based also upon the 
principles which have molded and maintained 
a mighty free nation. Its place in the hfe of 
to-day is honoured and conspicuous, and rests 
upon the rock of a people's gratitude. 

During the nineteenth century it was pro- 
claimed by many orators, among them John 
Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Edward Everett, 
Robert Charles Winthrop, and George Frisbie 
Hoar — to name only the century's dead — 
who as New Englanders and lovers of hberty 
were well fitted to voice the virtues of the Pil- 
grim Fathers, the hardships they endured, their 
high merits as colonists compared with other 
colonists of ancient and modern times, and the 
immense issues springing from their devout, 
laborious, and self-sacrificing hves. 

Passing on to the twentieth century we have 
the story taken up by one American President 
and continued by another at the cornerstone 
laying and dedication of a combined tribute of 
State and Nation to the hves and work of the 



104 T^HE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

Forefathers. This was the Pilgrim Memorial 
Monument, erected at Provincetown on a com- 
manding site above the harbour in whose waters 
the Mayflower dropped her anchor nearly three 
centuries ago. 

The gatherings there of 1907 and 191 stand 
out prominently in Pilgrim history, especially 
so that of August 5 of the latter year, which 
was grandly impressive ahke in its magnitude 
and its purpose and character. President Taft, 
the successor of President Roosevelt, arrived in 
his yacht Mayflower with imposing naval dis- 
play amid rejoicing and the booming of guns. 
He was greeted by Governor of the State Eben 
S. Draper, Captain J. H. Sears, president of the 
Cape Cod Pilgrim Memorial Association, and 
members of the local committee. Accompany- 
ing him were Secretary of the Navy George 
von L. Meyer, United States Senators Henry 
Cabot Lodge and George Peabody Wetmore, 
and Justice White of the United States Supreme 
Court. The scene and the ceremonies, soul- 
stirring and significant, are worthy of permanent 
record. 

Escorted by a company of bluejackets, of 
whom two thousand, with marines from the 
warships, Hned the street from the wharf. 
President Taft and the other guests were driven 
up the hill to the Monument, where, from the 
grandstand at its base, Captain Sears reviewed 
the plans which resulted in its erection. 

President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard Uni- 




Photograph by A. S. Burbank. Plymouth 

The Pilgrim Memorial Monument at Provincetown 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 107 

versity gave an historical address. In graphic 
language he contrasted the desolate prospect 
confronting the Pilgrims at Cape Cod with the 
picture upon which the present concourse gazed, 
a happy and prosperous population filHng the 
smihng land and in the harbour traversed by 
the Mayflower a varied throng of ships, "with 
them numerous representatives of a strong naval 
force maintained by the eighty million free people 
who in nine generations from the Pilgrims have 
explored, subdued, and occupied that mysteri- 
ous wilderness so formidable to the imagination 
of the early European settlers on the Atlantic 
coast of the American continent." 

With force and pathos Dr. EHot spoke of the 
debt they all owed to the Pilgrim Fathers. 
"We are to hear the voices of the Chief Magis- 
trate of this multitudinous people and of the 
Governor of the Commonwealth acknowledging 
the immeasurable indebtedness of the United 
States and of the Colony, Province, and State of 
Massachusetts to the adult men and the eighteen 
adult women who were the substance or seed- 
bearing core of the Pilgrim company; and we, 
the thousands brought hither peacefully in a 
few summer hours by vehicles and forces unim- 
agined in 1620 from the wide circuit of Cape 
Cod — which it took the armed parties from the 
Mayflower a full month to explore in the wintry 
weather they encountered — salute tenderly and 
reverently the Pilgrims of the Mayflower, and, 
recafling their fewness and their sufl'erings. 



io8 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

anxieties and labours, felicitate them and our- 
selves on the wonderful issues in human joy, 
strength, and freedom of their faith, endurance, 
and dauntless resolution." 

Dr. Eliot was followed by M. Van Weede, 
charge d'affaires of the Netherlands Legation at 
Washington, whose Government was represented 
on this occasion because the Pilgrims sailed from 
Holland. (The cornerstone laying three years 
before was attended by the British Ambassador.) 

Formal transfer of the Monument from the 
National Commission, which directed its con- 
struction, to the Commonwealth of Massachu- 
setts and the Pilgrim Memorial Association, was 
made on behalf of the United States Govern- 
ment by Senator Lodge, who enlarged upon the 
two great political principles embodied in the 
Mayflower compact, the conception of an organic 
law and of a representative democracy, and on 
the noble purpose — that of securing freedom 
of worship and the preservation of their nation- 
ality and native language — of the Kttle band 
of exiles who signed the document and settled 
there. 

Wilham B. Lawrence of Med ford accepted the 
Monument on behalf of the Memorial Associa- 
tion, and a quartet sang "The Landing of the 
Pilgrims," by Mrs. Felicia Hemans. 

Congressman James T. McCIeary of Minne- 
sota, who supported the bill in Congress for a 
Government appropriation to assist in the build- 
ing of the Monument, also spoke. 




THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS in 

Governor Draper then introduced the Presi- 
dent. "This Monument," he said, ** shows that 
our people and our State and National Govern- 
ment honour and revere the Pilgrims and the 
great principles of government they enunciated," 
and for that reason, he added, " It is most fitting 
that this Monument, whose cornerstone was 
laid by one President, should be dedicated by 
another." 

President Taft declared that the spirit which 
animated the Pilgrim Fathers had made the 
history of the United States what it was by 
furnishing it with the highest ideals of moral 
Kfe and pohtical citizenship. " It is meet there- 
fore," said he, "that the United States, as well 
as the State of Massachusetts, should unite in 
placing here a Memorial to the Pilgrims. The 
warships that are here with their cannon to 
testify to its national character typify the 
strength of that Government whose people have 
derived much from the spirit and example of 
the heroic band. Governor Bradford, Elder 
Brewster, Captain Miles Standish are the types 
of men in whom as ancestors, either by blood, 
or by education and example as citizens, the 
American people may well take pride." 

The ceremonies were brought to a close by 
Miss Barbara Hoyt, a descendant of Elder 
Brewster, unveihng a bronze tablet over the door 
of the Monument facing the harbour which 
bears an appropriate inscription written by 
Dr. EHot. 



112 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

And so this magnificent Monument stands as 
a landmark which, seen from afar across the 
ocean, will remind the traveller of the small 
beginnings of New England when, in the words 
of Dr. Eliot, fired and led by the love of hberty, 
the Mayflower Pilgrims here "founded and main- 
tained a State without a king or a noble, and a 
Church without a bishop or a priest." 

It is upon record that in the early days of the 
Plymouth Plantation an expedition was made 
in the Mayflower's shaflop, a big boat of about 
fourteen tons, to a point lower down on the coast, 
where the party made friends with the Shawmut 
Indians and found a fine place for shipping, and 
forty-seven beautiful islands, which they greatly 
admired as they sailed in and out amongst them. 
This was the future Boston Harbour. 

It is interesting to reflect that when, a decade 
and more after the Pilgrim Fathers had landed 
in America, some hundreds of Puritan colonists 
embarked for Massachusetts, many of the lead- 
ing burgesses of the then only Boston — that 
Old Boston, scene of the Pilgrims' detention 
and sufl'ering — were of the number. The town 
cannot claim a contribution to the Mayflower, 
but it has a boast as proud, for it was because 
the ancient seaport sent so large a contingent 
of Puritans to America that it was ordered "that 
Trimountain," the site overlooking the sheltered 
waters and the island group which dehghted 
Pilgrim eyes, "shafl be cafled Boston." 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 115 

It was in the spring of 1630 that the main 
body of Puritan emigrants, John Winthrop's 
party, sailed from Southampton. A year before 
that the Massachusetts Bay Company dis- 
patched to the West an expedition of five ships, 
and one of them was our old friend the wonderful 
little Mayflower, of immortal memory, which 
nine years earlier had carried out the Plymouth 
Pilgrims and was now assisting in the settlement 
of Massachusetts ! 

Among the Bostonians and their friends who 
sailed with or in the wake of Winthrop were 
Richard Belhngham, Recorder of the town 
(Nathaniel Hawthorne in "The Scarlet Letter" 
draws Governor Belhngham of the New Boston) ; 
bold Atherton Hough aforementioned. Mayor of 
the borough in 1628; Thomas Leverett, an alder- 
man, "a plain man, yet piously subtle"; Thomas 
Dudley and young John Leverett, who became 
Governors of Massachusetts; Wifliam Codding- 
ton, father and governor of Rhode Island; and 
John Cotton, the far-famed Puritan preacher 
of Boston church, who became one of the leading 
rehgious forces of New England hfe. 

And Old Boston, we have seen, is still much as 
it was outwardly over three hundred years ago, 
when the Pilgrim Fathers gazed upon it, and 
later Cotton preached long but edifying sermons 
in the vast church, and the Puritan warden struck 
the Romish symbol from the hand of a carven 
image on the noble tower. 

The first days of the Trimountain Colony 



ii6 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

resembled in some of their features those of the 
planting of New Plymouth. Although their 
shelter was of the scantiest, the settlers had not, 
like the settlers of Plymouth, to face at the 
outset the rigors of a Western winter. The 
Pilgrims arrived in December, on the shortest 
day of the year, whereas the day of the Puritans* 
landing was the very longest. Sickness and 
famine had nevertheless to be fought. Disease 
quickly carried off twenty per cent, of the people. 
About a hundred others returned home discour- 
aged. The rest persevered, and proved them- 
selves worthy followers of the New Plymouth 
Pilgrims. The Colony was, moreover, recruited 
by fresh comers from the old country; and 
through many vicissitudes, dissensions, and set- 
backs, much that was blasting to the spiritual 
and moral life and development of the Colony, 
it prospered materially and gathered strength. 
And there grew up the New England States. 

On the slope of Burial Hill,^ surrounded by 
memorials of the Pilgrim Fathers and with the 
graves of their dead in the background; facing 
down that stream-skirted street of the Pilgrims 
once bordered by their humble dwellings and 
echoing to the tread of their weary feet; looking 
out upon the waters which bore to this haven, 
long years ago, the storm-tossed Mayflower and 

^ Burial Hill was the site of the embattled church erected 
in 1622, and contains many ancient tombstones and the 
foundations of a watchtower (1643), ^^w covered with sod. 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 119 

her eager human freight, there stands to-day 
a church which through the centuries has pre- 
served unbroken records and maintained a con- 
tinuous ministry. This is the First Church in 
Plymouth and the first church in America, the 
church of Scrooby, Leyden, and the Mayflower 
company, the church of Brewster and Bradford, 
of Winslow and Carver, whose first covenant, 
signed in the cabin of the little emigrant ship, 
is still the basis of its fellowship. Here Roger 
Wilhams, the banished of Boston and missionary 
of Rhode Island — a man according to Bradford 
of "many precious parts, but very unsettled in 
judgment" — ministered for a time under Ralph 
Smith in the early stormy days of the sister 
colony; and here John Cotton, son of the famous 
Boston teacher and preacher — "a man of 
scholarly tastes and habits, somewhat decided 
in his convictions, diligent and faithful in his 
pastoral duties" ^ — was pastor for nearly thirty 
years from 1669. 

As the First Church in Boston is the fifth of 
its fine, so is the First Church in Plymouth the 
fifth meeting-house used by the Pilgrim com- 
munity. Its predecessor, a shrine of Pilgrim 
history around which precious associations clus- 
tered, was destroyed by fire in 1892; from the 

^ John Cuckson, " History of the First Church in Plym- 
outh." Dying in 1699, two years after his resignation 
at Charleston, South CaroHna, Cotton was "buried with 
respect and honour by his old parishioners, who erected 
a monument over his grave." 



120 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

burning ruins was rescued the town bell cast by 
Paul Revere in 1801, and this sacred relic hangs 
and tolls again in the tower of the present edifice. 
Amid such scenes as these well may we of 
to-day pause and reflect. For on this hallowed 
spot, with its historic environment and its 
striking reminders of a great and honoured 
past, was rocked the cradle of a nation of whose 
civil and rehgious liberty it was the first rude 
home. 



THE PILGRIM ROLL CALL— FATE AND 
FORTUNES OF THE FATHERS 



^^ 




i 



Photograph by A. S. Burbank, PlymotUh 

The Pilgrim Fathers' Memorial, Plymouth 



THE PILGRIM ROLL CALL — FATE AND 
FORTUNES OF THE FATHERS 

On Fame's eternall beadroll wortbie to be fyled. 

Edmund Spenser. 

There were men with hoary hair 

Amidst that pilgrim band: 
Why had they come to wither there. 

Away from their childhood's land? 

There was woman's fearless eye. 

Lit by her deep love's truth; 
There was manhood's brow serenely high. 

And the fiery heart oj youth. 

O sings Mrs. Hemans in. her famous poem 
"The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers 
in New England." That devoted little 
Pilgrim band comprised, indeed, the Fathers 
and their famihes together, members of both 
sexes of all ages. When the compact was 
signed in the Mayflower's cabin on November 
21, 1620, while the vessel lay off Cape Cod, 
each man subscribing to it indicated those 
who accompanied him. There were forty-one 
signatories, and the total number of pas- 
sengers was shown to be one hundred and 
two. What became of them? What was their 
individual lot and fate subsequent to the land- 
ing on Plymouth Rock on December 26? For 



128 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

long, long years the record as regards the ma- 
jority of them was lost to the world. Now, 
after much painstaking search, it has been 
found, bit by bit, and pieced together. And 
we have it here. It is a document full of human 
interest. 

John Alden, the youngest man of the party, 
was hired as a cooper at Southampton, with 
right to return to England or stay in New 
Plymouth. He preferred to stay, and married, 
in 1623, Priscilla MuIIins, the "May-flower of 
Plymouth," the maiden who, as the legend goes, 
when he first went to plead Miles Standish's 
suit, witchingly asked, *' Prithee, why don't you 
speak for yourself, John?" Alden was chosen 
as assistant in 1633, and served from 1634 to 
1639 and from 1650 to 1686. He was treasurer 
of the Colony from 1656 to 1659; was Deputy 
from Duxbury in 1641-42, and from 1645 ^^ 
1649; ^ member of the Council of War from 
1653 to 1660 and 1675-76; a soldier in Captain 
Miles Standish's company 1643. ^^ was the 
last survivor of the signers of the compact of 
November, 1620, dying September 12, 1687, 
aged eighty-four years. 

Bartholomew Allerton, born in Holland in 
161 2, was in Plymouth in 1627, when he returned 
to England. He was son of Isaac Allerton. 

Isaac Allerton, a tailor of London, married 
at Leyden, November 4, 161 1, Mary Norris 
from Newbury, Berkshire, England. He was a 
freeman of Leyden. His wife died February 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 131 

25, 1 62 1, at Plymouth. Allerton married Fear 
Brewster (his second wife), who died at 
Plymouth, December 12, 1634. In 1644 he 
had married Joanna (his third wife). He was 
an assistant in 1621 and 1634, and Deputy 
Governor. He was living in New Haven in 
1642, later in New York, then returned to New 
Haven. He died in 1659. 

John Allerton, a sailor, died before the May- 
flower made her return* voyage. Mary Allerton, 
a daughter of Isaac, was born in 16 16. She 
married Elder Thomas Cushman. She died in 
1 699, the last survivor of the Mayflower passen- 
gers. Remember Allerton was another daughter 
Hving in Plymouth in 1627. Sarah Allerton, 
yet another daughter, married Moses Maverick 
of Salem. 

Francis BiHington, son of John and Eleanor, 
went out in 1620 with his parents. In 1634 he 
married widow Christian (Penn) Eaton, by 
whom he had children. He removed before 
1648 to Yarmouth. He was a member of the 
Plymouth mihtary company in 1643. He died 
in Yarmouth after 1650. 

John Bilhngton was hanged ^ in 1630 for the 



* The murderer Billington, sad to relate, was one of 
those who signed the historic compact on board the May- 
flower. He was tried, condemned to death, and executed 
by his brethren in accordance with their primitive criminal 
procedure. At first, trials in the httle colony were con- 
ducted by the whole body of the townsmen, the Governor 
presiding. In 1623 trial by jury was established, and 



132 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

murder of John Newcomen. His widow, Elea- 
nor, who went over with him, married in 1638 
Gregory Armstrong, who died in 1650, leaving 
no children by her. John Billington, a son of 
John and Eleanor, born in England, died at 
Plymouth soon after 1627. 

William Bradford, baptised in 1589 at Auster- 
field, Yorkshire, was a leading spirit in the Pilgrim 
movement from its inception to its absorption 
in the Union of the New England Colonies. We 
have seen how, on the death of John Carver, he 
became the second Governor of Plymouth Col- 
ony, and he five times filled that office, in 1621- 
33, 1635, 1^37' 1639-44, and 1645-47, as well as 
serving several times as Deputy Governor and 
assistant. A patent was granted to him in 

subsequently a regular code of laws was adopted. The 
capital offences were treason, murder, diabolical conversa- 
tion, arson, rape, and unnatural crimes. Plymouth had 
only six sorts of capital crime, against thirty-one in 
England at the accession of James I, and of these six it 
actually punished only two, Billington's belonging to one 
of them. The Pilgrims used no barbarous punishments. 
Like all their contemporaries they used the stocks and the 
whipping-post, without perceiving that those punishments 
in pubhc were barbarizing. They inflicted fines and for- 
feitures freely without regard to the station or quality of 
the offenders. They never punished, or even committed 
any person as a witch. Restrictive laws were early 
adopted as to spirituous drinks, and in 1667 cider was 
included. In 1638 the smoking of tobacco was forbidden 
out-of-doors within a mile of a dwelhng-house or while at 
work in the fields; but unhke England and Massachusetts, 
Plymouth never had a law regulating apparel. 




Pholoi/raph by A. S. Burbank, Plymouth 

Governor Bradford's Monument, Burial Hill, Plymouth 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 135 

1629 by the Council of New England vesting 
the Colony in trust to him, his heirs, associates 
and assigns, confirming their title to a tract of 
land and conferring the power to frame a consti- 
tution and laws; but eleven years later he trans- 
ferred this patent to the General Court, reserving 
only to himself the allotment conceded to him 
in the original division of land. Bradford's 
rule as chief magistrate was marked by honesty 
and fair dealing, ahke in his relations with the 
Indian tribes and his treatment of recalcitrant 
colonists. His word was respected and caused 
him to be trusted; his will was resolute in every 
emergency, and yet all knew that his clemency 
and charity might be counted on whenever it 
could be safely exercised. The Church was 
always dear to him: he enjoyed its faith and 
respected its institutions, and up to the hour 
of his death, on May 9, 1657, he confessed his 
delight in its teachings and simple services. 
Governor Bradford was twice married, first, as 
we know, at Leyden in 161 3 to Dorothy May, 
who was accidentally drowned in Cape Cod 
harbour on December 7, 1620; and again on 
August 14, 1623, to AHce Carpenter, widow 
of Edward Southworth. By his first wife he 
had one son, and by his second, two sons and 
a daughter. Jointly with Edward Winslow, 
Bradford wrote "A Diary of Occurences during 
the First Year of the Colony," and this was 
pubhshed in England in 1622. He left many 
manuscripts, letters and chronicles, verses and 



M 



136 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

dialogues, which are the principal authorities 
for the early history of the Colony; but the work 
by which he is best remembered is his manu- 
script "History of Plymouth Plantation," now 
happily, after being carried to England and 
lost to sight for years in the Fulham Palace 
Library, restored to the safe custody of the 
State of Massachusetts. 

William Brewster more than any man was 
entitled to be called the Founder of the Pilgrim 
Church. It originated in his house at Scrooby, 
where he was born in 1566, and he sacrificed 
everything for it. He was elder of the church 
at Leyden and Plymouth, and served it also as 
minister for some time after going out. Through 
troubles, trials, and adversity, he stood by the 
Plymouth flocks, and when his followers were in 
peril and perplexity, worn and almost hopeless 
through fear and suffering, he kept a stout heart 
and bade them be of good cheer. Bradford has 
borne touching testimony to the personal attri- 
butes of his friend, who, he tells us, was "qualified 
above many," and of whom he writes that "he 
was wise and discrete, and well-spoken, having 
a grave and dehberate utterance, of a very 
cheerful spirite, very sociable and pleasante 
among his friends, of an humble and modest 
mind, of a peaceable disposition, under-valewing 
himself and his own abilities and sometimes over- 
vallewing others, inoffensive and innocent in 
his hfc and conversation, which gained him ye 
love of those without, as well as those within." 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 



39 



Of William Brewster it has been truly said that 
until his death, on April i6, 1644, his hand 
was never Hfted from Pilgrim history. He 
shaped the counsels of his colleagues, helped to 
mould their pohcy, safeguarded their hberties, 
and kept in check tendencies towards religious 
bigotry and oppression. He tolerated differ- 
ences, but put down wrangling and dissension, 
and promoted to the best of his power the 
strength and purity of pubhc and private hfe. 
Mary Brewster, wife of William, who went out 
with him, died before 1627. 

Love Brewster, son of Elder Wilham, born in 
England, married (1634) Sarah, daughter of Wil- 
ham Colher. He was a member of the Duxbury 
company in 1643, ^^^ ^^^^ ^t Duxbury in 1650. 

Wresthng Brewster, son of Elder Wilham, 
emigrated at the same time; he died a young 
man, unmarried. 

Richard Britteridge died December 21, 1620, 
his being the first death after landing. 

Peter Brown probably married the widow 
Martha Ford; he died in 1633. 

Wilham Button, a servant of Samuel Fuller, 
died on the voyage. 

John Carver, first Governor of the Plymouth 
Colony, landed from the Mayflower with his 
wife, Catherine, and both died the following 
spring or summer. Carver was deacon in Hol- 
land. He left no descendants. 

Robert Carter was a servant of Wilham 
Mulhns, and died during the first winter. 



140 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

James Chilton died December 8, 1620, 
before the landing at Plymouth, and his wife 
succumbed shortly after. Their daughter Mary, 
tradition states, romantically if not truthfully, 
was the first to leap on shore. She married 
John Winslow, and had ten children. 

Richard Clarke died soon after arrival. 

Francis Cook died at Plymouth in 1663. 

John Cook, son of Francis Cook by his wife, 
Esther, shipped in the Mayflower with his 
father. He married Sarah, daughter of Richard 
Warren. On account of religious differences he 
removed to Dartmouth, of which he was one of 
the first purchasers. He became a Baptist 
minister there. He was also Deputy in 1666-68, 
1673, ^^d 1681-83-86. The father and son were 
both members of the Plymouth military company 
in 1643. 

John Cook died at Dartmouth after 1694. 

Humility Cooper returned to England, and 
died there. 

John Crackston died in 1621; his son, John, 
who went out with him, died in 1628. 

Edward Dotey married Faith Clark, probably 
as second wife, and had nine children, some of 
whom moved to New Jersey, Long Island, and 
elsewhere. He was a purchaser of Dartmouth, 
but moved to Yarmouth, where he died August 
23» ^^55- He made the passage out as a 
servant to Stephen Hopkins, and was wild and 
headstrong in his youth, being a party to the 
first duel fought in New England. 



THE MAYFLOV/ER PILGRIMS 143 

Francis Eaton went over with his first wife, 
Sarah, and their son, Samuel. He married a 
second wife, and a third, Christian Penn, before 
1627. He died in 1633. 

Samuel Eaton married, in 1661, Martha 
BilHngton. In 1643 he was in the Plymouth 
mihtary company, and was hving at Duxbury 
in 1663. He removed to Middleboro, where he 
died about 1684. 

Thomas Enghsh died the first winter. 

One Ely, a hired man, served his time and 
returned to England. 

Moses Fletcher married at Ley den, in 161 3, 
widow Sarah Dingby. He died during the first 
winter. 

Edward Fuller shipped with his wife, Ann, 
and son, Samuel. The parents died the first 
season. 

Samuel Fuller, the son, married in 1635 Jane, 
daughter of the Reverend John Lothrop; he 
removed to Barnstable, where he died October 
31, 1683, having many descendants. 

Dr. Samuel Fuller, brother of Edward, was 
the first physician; he married (i) Elsie Glascock, 
(2) Agnes Carpenter, (3) Bridget Lee; he died 
in 1633. His descendants of the name are 
through a son, Samuel, who settled in Middle- 
boro. 

Richard Gardiner, mariner, was at Plymouth 
in 1624, but soon disappeared. 

John Goodman, unmarried, died the first 
winter. 



144 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

John Hooke died the first winter, as did also 
William Holbeck. 

Giles Hopkins, son of Stephen, married in 
1639 Catherine Wheldon; he moved to Yar- 
mouth and afterwards to Eastham, and died 
about 1690. 

Stephen Hopkins went out with his second 
wife, Elizabeth, and Giles and Constance, chil- 
dren by a first wife. On the voyage a child was 
born to them, which they named Oceanus, but 
it died in 162 1. He was an assistant, 1634-35, 
and died in 1644. His wife died between 1640 
and 1644. Constance, daughter of Stephen, 
married Nicholas Snow. They settled at East- 
ham, from which he was a Deputy in 1648, 
and he died November 15, 1676; she died in 
October, 1677, having had twelve children. 
Damaris, a daughter, was born after their 
arrival and married Jacob Cooke. 

John Howland married Ehzabeth, daughter of 
John Tilley. He was a Deputy in 1641, 1645 
to 1658, 1 66 1, 1663, 1666-67, and 1670; assistant 
in 1634 and 1635; also a soldier in the Plymouth 
mihtary company in 1643. He died February 
23, 1673, aged more than eighty years, and his 
widow died December 21, 1687, aged eighty 
years. 

John Langemore died during the first winter. 

Wilham Latham about 1640 left for England, 
and afterwards went to the Bahamas, where he 
probably died. 

Edward Leister went to Virginia. 




Photograph by A. .S. Burbank, Plymouth 

The Grave of John How land 




THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 147 

Edmund Margeson, unmarried, died in 1621. 

Christopher Martin and wife both died early; 
his death took place January 8, 1621. 

Desire Minter returned to England, and there 
died. 

Ellen More perished the first winter. 

Jasper More removed to Scituate, and his 
name is said to have become Mann. He died 
in Scituate in 1656; his brother died the first 
winter. 

WiHiam MuUins shipped with his wife, son 
Joseph, and daughter Priscilla, who married 
John Alden. The father died February 21, 
1 62 1, and his wife during the same winter, as 
did also the son. 

Solomon Power died December 24, 1620. 

Degory Priest married in 161 1, at Leyden, 
widow Sarah Vincent, a sister of Isaac Allerton; 
he died January i, 1621. 

John Rigdale went out with his wife, Ahce, 
both dying the first winter. 

Joseph Rogers went with his father, Thomas 
Rogers, who died in 1621. The son married, 
and lived at Eastham in 1655, dwelling first at 
Duxbury and Sandwich. He was a lieutenant, 
and died in 1678 at Eastham. 

Harry Sampson settled at Duxbury, and 
married Ann Plummer in 1636. He was of the 
Duxbury mifitary company in 1643, ^^^ ^^^^ 
there in 1684. 

George Soule was married to Mary Becket. 
He was in the mifitary company of Duxbury, 



148 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

where he resided, and was the Deputy in 1645-46, 
and 1650-54. He was an original proprietor of 
Bridgewater and owner of land in Dartmouth 
and Middleboro; he died 1680, his wife in 
1677. 

Ellen Story died the first winter. 

Miles Standish, that romantic figure in the 
Pilgrim history, did good service for the Colony, 
and practically settled the question whether 
the Anglo-Saxon or the native Indian was to 
predominate in New England. Born in Lan- 
cashire about 1584, and belonging to the Dux- 
bury branch of the Standish family, he obtained 
a heutenant's commission in the Enghsh army 
and fought in the wars against The Netherlands 
and Spain. His taste for mihtary adventure led 
to his joining the Pilgrims at Leyden, and when 
the Mayflower reached Cape Cod, he led the 
land exploring parties. Soon he was elected 
military captain of the Colony, and with a 
small force he protected the settlers against 
Indian incursions until the danger from that 
quarter was past. When they were made 
peaceably secure in their rights and possessions, 
and warhke exploits and adventures were at an 
end, Standish retired to his estate at Duxbury, 
on the north side of Plymouth Bay: but in 
peace, as in war, he was still devoted to the 
interests of the Colony, frequently acting as 
Governor's assistant from 1632 onward, becom- 
ing Deputy in 1644, and serving as treasurer 
between that year and 1649. His wife Rose, 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 151 

who sailed with him in the Mayflower, died 
January 29, 1621, but he married again, and 
had four sons and a daughter. He died on 
October 3, 1656, honoured by all the commu- 
nity among whom he dwelt, and his name and 
fame are perpetuated in history, in the poetry 
of Longfellow and Lowell, and by the monument 
which stands upon what was his estate at Dux- 
bury, the lofty column on Captain's Hill, seen 
for miles both from sea and land. 

Edward Thompson died December 4, 1620. 

Edward Tilley and his wife Ann both died the 
first winter. 

John Tilley accompanied his wife and daugh- 
ter Elizabeth; the parents died the first winter, 
but the daughter survived and married John 
Howland. 

Thomas Tinker, with his wife and son, died 
the first winter. 

John Turner had with him two sons, but the 
party succumbed to the hardships of the first 
season. 

Wilham Trevore entered as a sailor on the 
Mayflower, and returned to England on the 
Fortune in 1621. 

Wifliam White went out with his wife Susanna, 
and son Resolved. A son, Peregrine, was born 
to them in Provincetown Harbour, who has 
been distinguished as being the first child of the 
Pilgrims born after the arrival in the New World. 
This is his strongest claim, as his early fife 
was rather disreputable, though his obituary, in 



^msm 




THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

1704, allowed "he was much reformed in his 
last years." William, the father, died on Febru- 
ary 21, 1 621; his widow married, in the May 
following, Edward Winslow, who had recently 
lost his wife. 

Resolved White married (i) Judith, daughter 
of William Vassall ; he lived at Scituate, Marsh- 
field, and lastly Salem, where he married, 
(2) October 5, 1674, widow Abigail Lord, and 
died after 1680. He was a member of the 
Scituate military company in 1643. 

Roger Wilder died the first winter, and Thomas 
Williams also died the first season. 

Edward Winslow, an educated young English 
gentleman from Droitwich, joined the brethren 
at Leyden in 161 7, and accompanying them to 
New England, was the third to sign the compact 
on board the Mayflower, Carver and Bradford 
signing before, and Brewster after him, then 
Isaac Allerton and Miles Standish. Winslow 
was one of the party sent to prospect along the 
coast. Before leaving Holland, he married at 
Leyden, in 161 8, Elizabeth Barker, who went 
out with him, but died March 24, 1621, and 
as we have seen, he shortly afterwards mar- 
ried widow Susanna (Fuller) White. Winslow 
proved himself a man of exceptional ability and 
character, and gave the best years of his life to 
the service of the Colony. While on a mission 
to England in its interests in 1623, he published 
an account of the settlement and struggles of 
the Mayflower Pilgrims, under the title "Good 




Photograph hu .1. N. liurlmnk, Pli/mnu/i 

The Miles Standism Monlment, Duxbuky 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 155 

News for New England, or a relation of things 
remarkable in that Plantation." Later he wrote 
(and published in 1646) "Hypocrisie Unmasked; 
by a true relation of the proceedings of the Gov- 
ernor of Massachusetts against Samuel Groton, 
a notorious Disturber of the Peace," which is 
chiefly remarkable for an appendix giving an 
account of the preparations in Leyden for re- 
moval to America, and the substance of John 
Robinson's address to the Pilgrims on their 
departure from Holland. Winslow was Gov- 
ernor of the Colony in 1633, 1636, and 1644, and 
at other times assistant. In 1634 he went to 
England again on colonial business, and before 
saihng accepted a commission for the Bay Colony 
which required him to appear before the King's 
Commissioners for Plantations. Here he was 
brought face to face with Archbishop Laud, who 
could not resist the opportunity of venting his 
wrath upon the representative of the Plymouth 
settlement, about whose sayings and doings he 
had been duly informed. Winslow was accused 
of taking part in Sunday services and of conduct- 
ing civil marriages. He admitted the charges, 
and pleaded extenuating circumstances; but 
Laud was not to be appeased and committed the 
bold Separatist to the Fleet Prison, where he 
remained for seventeen weeks, when he was 
released and permitted to return to America, 
wounded in his conscience by the cruel wrong 
done him and impoverished by legal expenses. 
In October, 1646, against the advice of his com- 



156 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

patriots, Winslow undertook another mission to 
the old country, this time in connection with 
the federation of the New England Colonies, and, 
accepting service under Cromwell, sailed on an 
expedition to the West Indies, caught a fever, 
and died, and was buried at sea on May 8, 1655. 

Gilbert Winslow, another subscriber to the 
compact in the Mayflower's cabin, returned 
subsequently to England and died in 1650. 

Apart from the events of their after hves, the 
spirit which possessed the Mayflower Pilgrims 
and guided their leaders in exile is well expressed 
by Mrs. Hemans when she says, in her stirring 
lines — 

They sought a faith's pure shrine! 
Ay, call it holy ground, 

The soil where first they trod; 
They have left unstained what there they found — 

Freedom to worship God. 




Phulof/raph by A. S. Burbnnk. Plymouth 

GovEKNOR Edward W'insi.ow 
The only aulbenlic Portrait <>J u Minjlower [^iltiriin 



VI 



NEW WORLD PILGRIMS TO OLD 
WORLD SHRINES 

pilgrim shrines. 
Shrines to no code or creed confined. — Longfellow. 

MEMORIES of the Mayflower and the 
Pilgrim Fathers were actively revived 
when, in July, 1891, during the Mayor- 
alty of Mr. J. T. Bond, a number of the Pilgrims' 
descendants and their representatives from the 
New World visited Old World Plymouth, and 
with an interest whole-hearted and profound 
inspected the scene, famous in the annals and 
traditions of our race, which witnessed their 
forbears' last brief sojourn on English soil — 
a place where the Fathers, as they never tired 
of testifying, in the days when Thomas Townes 
was Mayor, were "kindly entertained and cour- 
teously used by divers friends there dwelhng," 
and whence the sturdy little Mayflower sailed 
to the West with its precious human freight, to 
lay the foundation of the New England States. 
To commemorate this visit, and the sailing of 
the Pilgrim Fathers two hundred and seventy 
years before, the site of the historic embarkation 
was marked by the Mayflower Stone and Tablet 
placed on the Barbican at Plymouth, the stone 
163 



i64 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

in the pavement of the pier adjacent to the 
ancient causey trod by the Pilgrims' departing 
feet and destroyed a few years later, and the 
tablet on the wall of the Barbican facing it. 

The memorial and the circumstances of its 
erection formed a fitting tribute to the New Eng- 
land pioneers; and the story told by these stones 
should serve co remind all who behold them of 
the devoted lives, the splendid achievement, and 
the romantic history of the Mayflower Pilgrims. 
They are at once a landmark and a shrine hon- 
oured by the English and American peoples. 

In June, 1896, another company of New 
World pilgrims landed at Plymouth, and pro- 
ceeded to worship in spirit at Old World shrines. 
During two weeks they wandered about the dear 
old country — "Our Old Home,*' as Nathaniel 
Hawthorne calls it in his book of English remi- 
niscences — lingering on the scenes associated 
with the lives of their forefathers : quiet villages 
wherein they were born; quaint, half-forgotten 
boroughs in which they lived; the metropolis 
in which they taught; the sombre East Anglia, 
where many of them died "for the testimony." 
But chief of all were the places where these 
sojourners could look on the homes of the grave, 
brave men who gathered together the people 
who sailed in the Mayflower, and led the way 
to the New World. 

We still call them "the Pilgrim Fathers," in 
spite of what the Reverend Joseph Hunter, an 
esteemed native of South Yorkshire, wrote in 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 167 

his book.^ ** There is something of affectation 
in this term," he finds, "which is always dis- 
pleasing to me." "It appears to me," says he, 
"to be philologically improper." And then he 
explains. "An American who visits the place 
from which the founders of his country emigrated 
is a pilgrim in the proper sense of the word, 
whether he finds an altar, a shrine, or a stone of 
memorial, or not. But these founders, when 
they found the shores of America, were proceed- 
ing to no object of this kind, and even leaving 
it to the winds and the waves to drive them 
to any point on an unknown and unmarked 
shore." 

Perhaps Mr. Hunter is right, philologically; 
but apart from his history (which may be 
challenged, because the master of the Mayflower 
knew where he was going if the Pilgrims did not, 

^ "Collections Concerning the Early History of the 
Founders of New Plymouth." Mr. Hunter was assistant- 
keeper of H.M. Records, and after the village had re- 
mained for more than two centuries in obhvion, located 
Scrooby as the birthplace of the Pilgrim Church. His 
sole guide in the search were the brief statements in 
Bradford's History that the members of the church "were 
of several towns and villages, some in Nottinghamshire, 
some in Lincolnshire, and some in Yorkshire, where they 
bordered nearest together," and that "they ordinarily 
met at William Brewster's house on the Lord's day, which 
was a manor of the bishop's." The inquiry which led 
to this important discovery was instigated by the Honour- 
able James Savage while on a visit to England. The key 
was supplied by Governor Bradford, Mr. Savage detected 
it; Mr. Hunter unlocked the hidden and forgotten door. 



i68 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

and a map and description of the region had 
been pubhshed by Captain John Smith, the 
name-giver of New England), the designation 
stands, and will ever be cherished by those 
familiar with the spots these faithful Fathers 
left when, pilgrims and wanderers, they set 
forth they scarcely knew whither, and finally 
crossed the httle-known sea. And the most 
historic of such shrines are in Lincolnshire and 
Nottinghamshire. 

When the New World pilgrims arrived at 
Plymouth for the journey through the old 
country, by a curious arrangement they travelled 
backwards ; for Plymouth was the last place the 
Pilgrim Fathers touched, and the haunts they 
took in turn were those which saw the rise 
and earlier efforts of those grave and reverend 
seekers for religious freedom. Soon they reached 
Boston — dreamy, old-world, tide-washed, fen- 
land-Iocked Boston — scene of deep interest to 
them all, filled with hallowed memories of the 
Pilgrim Fathers and founders of the Western 
States. 

The party numbered nearly fifty, a dozen at 
least of whom could lay claim to be lineal descen- 
dants of the Mayflower Pilgrims. Their leader 
was the Reverend Dr. Dunning of Boston, Massa- 
chusetts, and among them were representatives 
of the National Council of American Congrega- 
tional churches. 

Boston, like Plymouth, gave them a warm 
welcome. The cordiality of their reception to 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 171 

the old town was acknowledged on behalf of the 
pilgrims by Dr. Dunning. "Our fathers found 
it difficult to get away from Boston," said he, 
''and from the kindness you have shown us we 
are much afraid that you are planning to detain 
us also." The character of the "detention" 
was very different with nearly three centuries 
intervening, and this Dr. Dunning and his friends 
abundantly reaHsed. 

The visitors were taken over the old parish 
church, and were duly impressed by its size and 
grandeur as a whole; and the scene was most 
striking and memorable when, gathered within 
its beautiful chancel, these representative New 
World men, many of them with the blood of 
the Pilgrim Fathers in their veins, joined in 
singing together the noble hymn, "O God, our 
help in ages past." Next the Guildhall was 
visited. Here the disused sessions-court, where 
the fugitives were arraigned in 1607, and other 
upper rooms were scrutinised. 

But most attractive were the kitchen and 
prison beneath. The cells must in fact have had 
more "prisoners" in them that day than they 
had held for a long time, for there was scarcely 
a member of the company who was not shut up 
in at least one of them during the inspection. 
They thus reahsed something of what their fore- 
fathers actually endured ; the taste of the bitter- 
ness was shght, and wanting in the old-time 
flavour which the prisoners' treatment imparted, 
but it was sufficient to call forth expressions of 




172 THE ROMANTIC STORY 

abhorrence at the thought of continued confine- 
ment in such a place. 

At last the pilgrims said farewell to a town 
crowded with precious memories and entrained 
for Lincoln, where their welcome by the Free 
Churches and Cathedral authorities was in keep- 
ing with that extended to them everywhere on 
their route. At Lincoln they received an address. 
"We feel," said the Nonconformists there, "that 
in welcoming you to this county of ours, we are 
welcoming you back to your ancestral home, 
for Lincolnshire people never forget that their 
county is inseparably associated with the history 
of the Pilgrim Church. We claim the great 
John Robinson, the pastor of the Pilgrim church, 
as our own, and the neighbouring town of Gains- 
borough boasts of having been for some time 
the church's home. We are proud of the men, 
of the testimony they bore, of the work they 
did. All England is debtor to the men of the 
Pilgrim Church for their heroic witness in behalf 
of a pure and Scriptural faith and freedom of 
conscience worship." 

And "the neighbouring town of Gains- 
borough," home of the Pilgrim Church, gave 
itself up at this time to a ceremonial stone- 
laying of the Robinson Memorial Church, a 
function which the American pilgrims attended, 
together with the Honourable T. F. Bayard, the 
United States Ambassador, who made a journey 
into Lincolnshire to lay this stone, and Congre- 
gationalists gathered from all parts. 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 175 

First the pilgrims drove to Scrooby, Bawtry, 
and Austerfield, where they inspected Brewster*s 
house and Bradford's cottage and other objects 
of absorbing interest hnked with the hves of the 
exiled Separatists. They then entered Gains- 
borough — that "foreign-looking town," subject 
of George Eliot's romantic pen, birthplace of 
John Robinson — where an address was pre- 
sented to Mr. Bayard at the Town Hall, and 
luncheon was partaken of at the Old Hall, one 
of Gainsborough's most cherished antiquities, 
where John Smyth and his brethren held services 
and John Wesley many times preached. A 
move was next made to the site of the future 
Robinson Memorial Hall, a building at once a 
tribute to a worthy Enghshman and an agency 
for the development of Christian work in the 
home of the Pilgrim Fathers. The proceedings 
were under the presidency of the Reverend J. 
M. Jones, chairman of the Congregational Union 
of England and Wales. To Mr. Bayard was 
handed a silver trowel, the gift of the congrega- 
tion of the Gainsborough church, bearing an 
inscription and engravings of the Maj^Hower and 
of Delfshaven, on whose beach Robinson knelt 
in prayer with the Pilgrim band ere they set out 
on their long and checkered voyage. Having 
laid the cornerstone Mr. Bayard sketched the 
early Hfe of John Robinson, on from his Cam- 
bridge career to his harassed ministry at Nor- 
wich, his withdrawal to Lincolnshire in 1604 
and the inception of the Scrooby congregation. 



176 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

whose faith found cause for hope and cheerful 
courage in the dark hours of their persecution, 
adversity, and affliction. He went on to picture 
the blessings of civil and reUgious Hberty which 
we are apt to accept and enjoy without giving 
much heed to the generations that in bygone 
years toiled and suffered to secure them for us. 
How small, said he, the measure of our gratitude 
and infrequent our recognition of those who 

Beyond their dark age led the van of thought. 

Well, reasoned Mr. Bayard, on such a scene and 
such an occasion as this, might the words of 
Whittier be repeated — 

Our hearts grow cold, 

We Hghtly hold 
A right which brave men died to gain; 

The stake, the cord, 

The axe, the sword. 
Grim nurses at its birth of pain. 

It was the momentous issues raised by the inva- 
sion of liberty of conscience that drove John 
Robinson and his associates forth. As WilHam 
Bradford has recorded, "Being thus molested 
and with no hope of their continuance there, by 
a joynte consent they resolved to go into ye low 
countries, where they heard was freedom of 
rehgion for all men." Then it was that they 
made the attempted passage from Boston to 
The Netherlands. 

Glancing at the history of the arbitrary and 
cruel measures taken to prevent the departure 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS i 



79 



of the congregation, which finally, in broken 
detachments, distressed, despoiled, imperilled by 
land and sea, assembled at Amsterdam, moving 
thence to Leyden, Mr. Bayard paid grateful 
recognition to the country which, in their hour 
of sore need, extended to exiles welcome protec- 
tion and generous toleration in an age of intoler- 
ance, and recited the familiar incidents connected 
with their sailing for America. " It is clear and 
plain to us now that the departure from England 
of this small body of humble men was a great 
step in the march of Christian civihsation. It 
contained the seed of Christian liberty, freedom 
of enquiry, freedom of man's conscience." As 
for John Robinson, between whose grave and 
the colony he was the means of planting, washes 
the wide ocean he never crossed. His memory 
is a tie of kindred — a recognition of the com- 
mon trust committed to both nations to sustain 
the principles of civil and religious Hberty of 
which he was a fearless champion, and under 
which he has so marvellously fulfilled the proph- 
esy "A little one shall become a thousand, and 
a small one a great nation." And the seed of 
Christian liberty, sown in adversity but on good 
soil, has become a wide-spreading tree in whose 
sheltering branches all who will may lodge. 

Six years after this stone-laying, in June, 
1902, the tercentenary of the founding of the 
Gainsborough church, a tablet was unveiled in 
the vestibule of the new building to commemo- 
rate the world-wide co-operation in honouring 



i8o THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

one "the thought of whom stirs equal reverence 
in English and American hearts." 

What the American Ambassador so well said 
at Gainsborough was a fitting prelude to the 
excursion which his countrymen, continuing 
their itinerary, made to the Pilgrim scenes in 
Holland where, in 1891, the English Plymouth 
memorial year, they had erected on St. Peter's 
Cathedral at Leyden, under which lie his bones, 
a tablet to John Robinson, pastor of the Enghsh 
church worshipping "over against this spot,'* 
whence at his prompting went forth the Pilgrim 
Fathers to settle New England. 

The Gainsborough ceremony and the visits 
to Plymouth and Boston forged further links in 
the chain of sympathy and brotherhood between 
England and America. Fresh evidence has 
since been forthcoming that the religious zeal 
and love of manly independence which induced 
the Mayflower Pilgrims to expatriate them- 
selves and found a mighty empire across the 
Atlantic have their abiding influence to-day. 
We have seen how these New World pilgrimages 
to Old World shrines rekindled dormant affec- 
tions on both sides. ^ No doubt the journeys 



Hn another part of England, in 1910-11, Americans 
were joining hands with the people of Southampton in 
raising on the old West Quay of that port a Pilgrim shrine 
to the men of New Plymouth who, as we know, sailed 
thence in the Mayflower on their interrupted voyage to 
the West, on August 5 (O.S.), 1620. It was proposed 
to unveil this memorial on August 15, 191 2. 



THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 183 

will be renewed again and again over much the 
same ground in the days to come. 

It was about this time that Mr. Bayard was 
instrumental in restoring to the State of Massa- 
chusetts William Bradford's manuscript "His- 
tory of Plymouth Plantation." About the middle 
of the eighteenth century this valuable record 
was deposited in the New England Library, in 
the tower of the Old South Church in Boston, 
but it disappeared, and found its way to England. 
By some it was thought that Governor Hutchin- 
son carried it off; others believed that it was 
looted by British soldiers when Boston was 
evacuated. Anyhow it vanished, and was given 
up for lost. But by a lucky chance it was dis- 
covered. It was not until 1855 that certain 
passages in Wilberforce's "History of the Prot- 
estant Episcopal Church in America," printed 
in 1846, professing to quote from "a manuscript 
History of Plymouth in the Fulham Library,'* 
revealed the whereabouts of the priceless folios. 
These quotations were identified as being similar 
to extracts from Bradford's History made by 
earlier annalists — Nathaniel Morton, who used 
it freely in his "New England's Memorial," 
pubhshed 1669; Thomas Prince, in his "Annals'* 
printed in 1736; and Governor Hutchinson, the 
last man known to have seen the manuscript, 
who used it in the preparation of his "History 
of Massachusetts" (second volume), in 1767. 
The story of the return of the manuscript has 
been told by the Honourable George F. Hoar, 



i84 THE ROMANTIC STORY OF 

the venerable Senator of Massachusetts who, 
during a visit to England, interviewed the Bishop 
of London on the subject, and, when the History 
had been recovered through the good offices of 
Mr. Bayard, had the satisfaction of handing 
it over to Governor Wolcott on May 24, 1897. 
Ten years subsequently, after Mr. Bayard's 
death, another Bishop of London, engaged on a 
mission to America, presented to President 
Roosevelt the original deed appointing Colonel 
Coddington first Governor of Rhode Island. 
This document was found in the muniment 
room at Fulham Palace; it bears the seal of the 
Cromwellian Government and the signature of 
Bradshaw. 

Those Americans who visited the district of 
Bawtry for the purpose of seeing the Pilgrim 
village of Austerfield would be surprised ten 
years later, in August, 1906, to hear that the 
font in the old parish church, which had so often 
been pointed to as that at which William Brad- 
ford was baptised, was not in reality what it had 
been represented to be. For some time there 
was a heated controversy in the district, and 
this revealed certain strange facts concerning the 
font which go to prove that the Norman font 
used at Bradford's baptism is at the present time 
in a small Primitive Methodist chapel at Lound 
near Retford, Nottinghamshire. It seems that 
about fifty years ago the sexton, one Milner, 
was ordered to clear certain rubbish out of the 
church at Austerfield, and sell it. Among the 




Photograph by Welchman Bros, Retford 

The Font, Austerfield Church 

For a long time it was believed that this font was used at 

the baptism oj William Bradford 




The Font, Primitive Mi imodisi (Chapel, Lound 
The font that was probably iised at the Impt'ism oj William Bradjord 




THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 187 

objects thus disposed of was the font. A farmer, 
John Jackson, became the purchaser, and a few 
years later the font passed to his son, who for 
some time kept it in his garden as an ornament. 
In 1895 the farm changed hands, the new tenant 
being a Mr. Fielding, and included in the fixtures 
he took over was the font, described in the 
auctioneers' valuation award, dated April 15, 
1895, as "Garden — Stone baptismal font (for- 
merly in Austerfield Parish Church)." Having 
no wish to keep the font Mr. Fielding gave it 
to his mother, a native of Austerfield, and she 
in turn handed it over to the trustees of the 
chapel at Lound, where it still remains, jealously 
guarded in the incongruous surroundings of its 
ahen home. It is noted that when, years ago, 
the clergyman at Austerfield discovered what 
sexton Milner had done, he sent for him and told 
him of the great loss the church had sustained. 
It was Httle use locking the stable door when the 
steed had gone, but the sexton, being a man of 
resource, thought he saw a way out of the diffi- 
culty. So to avoid further trouble he brought 
a trough from his own farmyard and substituted 
it for the lost font! That was a very impious 
kind of fraud indeed, but it seems quite clear 
that it was perpetrated. The church authorities, 
it must be admitted, have done their best to 
atone for the faults of the past in the direction 
of trying to restore the ancient font to its original 
place. Unfortunately they have not succeeded, 
for though good offers were made to Mrs. 



i88 THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS 

Fielding and the chapel trustees, they resolutely 
refused to part with the precious rehc. The 
fear was then entertained that a wealthy Ameri- 
can would some day buy the font, and thus 
deprive the district of one of its most historic 
possessions. It is questionable, however, if that 
fate would be worse than the one that has 
already overtaken the font. Should the failure 
to restore it to its rightful place unhappily con- 
tinue, the more satisfactory alternative would 
appear to be its purchase and presentation, say, 
to the Pilgrim Church at New Plymouth. 



THE END. 



ji^,f^'y\,\CYt^/''^^i^^r!^^^Sr^^^~^ 


^ 


m INDEX 


Vi 


11 Adams, John Quincy, 103 


Bradford, Governor William, 1 1- 


if 


W Ainsworth, Henry, 51 


12, 19, 20, 31, 43, 52, 59, 83, 


It 


iW Alden, John, 128, 147 


84, 88, 92, 95, 100, 103, III, 


f 1 


111 / Allerton, Bartholomew, 128 


119, 132-136, 152, 167, 175, 


ll 


|lW Allerton, Isaac, 59, 128-131, 


176, 183-184 


N 


Ml 147. 152 


Brewer, Thomas, 52, $§ 


III 


M Allerton, Joanna, 131 


Brewster, Fear, 95, 131 


fi 


/| Allerton, John, 131 


Brewster, Love, 139 


uhi 


In Allerton, Mary, 131 


Brewster, Mary, 96, 139 


Im 


k Allerton, Remember, 131 


Brewster, Patience, 95 


Al 


//J] Allerton, Sarah (i), 147 


Brewster, William, 4, 8, 11, 12, 


iini 


M Allerton, Sarah (2), 131 


19, 20, 23, 31, 39, 43, 52-55, 


MM 


/M Amsterdam, 51-52, 179 


59, 83, 88,91,92,96, III, 119, 


v>u 


m "Anne," The, 95 


136-139, 152, 167, 175 


MM 


y/| Armstrong, Gregory, 132 

V Austerfield, England, 11-12, 175, 


Brewster, Wrestling, 139 


WrO 


Bridgewater, Mass., 148 


if 


l\| 184-187 


Britteridge, Richard, 139 
Brown, Dr. John, 12 


i 


ffi/ Babworth, England, 11 
H/l Barker, Elizabeth, 152 


Brown, Peter, 139 


in 


Button, William, 139 


ll 


Wl Barnstable, Mass., 143 




n 


B Bawtry, 175, 184-187 


Caistor, England, 7 


1 


fl Bayard, Hon. T. J., 172, 175- 


Canute, King, 4, 15, 


1 


M 180, 183-184 


Carleton, Sir Dudley, 52-55 


j. 


m Becket, Mary, 147-148 


Carpenter, Alice, 95, 135, 143 


NJ 


^J Bellingham, Richard, 115 


Carter, Robert, 139 


ryi 


Km Billington, Eleanor, 131, 132 


Carver, Catherine, 83, 139 


va 


lyllj Billington, Francis, 131 


Carver, Governor John, 59, 60, 


V 


\WM Billington, John (i), 131- 132 


79. 83, 84. 119. 132, 139. 152 


vim 


Wl Billington, John (2), 132 


Chilton, James, 140 


I 


M Billington, Martha, 143 


Chilton, Mary, 140 




M Blommaert, Herr, 87 


Clark, Faith, 140 




1 Bond, J. T., 163 


Qarke, Richard, 140 




M Bonner, Bishop, 8 


Clyfton, Richard, n, 43. 52 


1/ 


m Boston, England, VHI, 7, 16, 


Coddington, William, 115, 184 


Hi 


H 19. 39. "2, 115, 168-172, 176, 


Collier, Sarah, 139 


lyf 


m 180; Pilgrim Cells, VII, XIII- 


Collier, William, 139 


ra 


If XIV, 32-36, 171; Guildhall, 


Connecticut Plantation, 100 


HI 


y 20, 23-24, 32-36, 171; Hussey 


Cook, Esther, 140 


|A 


J\ffl Tower, 20; Kyme Tower, 20; 


Cook, Francis, 140 


JbI 


ra^ Grammar School, 20; Church, 


Cook, John, 140 


^^1) 


W^ 20, 35, 171; Gysor's Hall, 23; 


Cooke, Jacob, 144 


•^\ 


r^ "Little Ease," 36 


Cooper, Humility, 14O 


f^ 


Z^ Boston, Mass., 100, 112, 168, 


Cotton, John (i), 23, 115, 119 


r^ 


^^ 183 {see abo Massachusetts 


Cotton, John (2), 119 


WQ. 


Y^ Bay Colony) 


Crackston, John (i), 140 


nr 


Jffl '^^ 


i 


^Jasl^^ii^ ' ^2»'LA3V^>U?3LAjS 



[QO 



INDEX 



Crackston, John (2), 140 
Cromwell, Oliver, 156 
Cromwell, Thomas, 8 
Cuckson, John, 119 
Cushman, Robert, 63, 92, 95, 96 

Dartmouth, England, 63 

Dartmouth, Mass., 140, 148 

Davidson, 8 

Delfshaven, 60, 175 

Dinghy, Sarah, 143 

Dotey, Edward, 140 

Doyle's " English in America," 7 

Draper, Eben S., 104, in 

Droitwich, 152 

Dudley, Thomas, 115 

Dunning, Dr., 168, 171 

Duxbury, Mass., 128, 139, 143, 
147, 148, 151; Standish Monu- 
ment, 151 

Eastham, Mass., 144, 147 

Eaton, Francis, 143 

Eaton, Samuel, 143 

Eaton, Sarah, 143 

Eliot, Charles W., 104-108, iii- 

112 
Eliot's, George, "The Mill on 

the Floss," 15-16, 20, 175 
Ely, One, 143 
English, Thomas, 143 
Everett, Edward, 103 

Fielding, 187-188 
Fletcher, Moses, 143 
Ford, Martha, 139 
"Fortune," The, 92, 95, 151 
Fuller, Anne, 143 
Fuller, Edward, 143 
Fuller, Samuel (i), 59, 100, 139 
Fuller, Samuel (2), 143 
Fuller, Samuel (3), 143 
Fuller, Susanna (see White, 
Susanna) 

Gainsborough, England, VIII, 4, 
II, 15-19. 20, 40, 51, 172, 175- 
176, 180; Old Hall, 16, 175 

Gardiner, Richard, 143 

Glascock (Fuller), Elsie, 95, 143 

Goodman, John, 143 

Grimsby, England, 40 

Groton, Samuel, 155 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 115, 164 
Hemans, Felicia, 108, 127, 156 



Hickman Family, 16 

Hoar, George Frisbie, 103, 183 

Holbeck, William, 144 

Hooke, John, 144 

Hopkins, Constance, 144 

Hopkins.Elizabeth, 144 

Hopkins, Giles, 144 

Hopkins, Oceanus, 144 

Hopkins, Stephen, 140, 144 

Horncastle, England, 7 

Hough, Atherton, 23, 115 

Howland, John, 59, 67, 144, 151 

Hoyt, Barbara, in 

Hull, England, 40 

Humber, The, 40 

Hunter, Rev. Joseph, 164-167 

Hutchinson, Governor, 183 

Immingham, England, 40 

Jackson, John, 187 
Jackson, Richard, 39 
James I, 52 
Jamestown, Va., 56 
John, King, 3 
Johnson, Francis, 51 
Jones, Rev. J. M., 175 
Jones, Captain Thomas, 60, 75- 
76, 167-168 

Kyle, William S., IX 

Langemore, John, 144 

Langton, Stephen, 3-4 

Latham, William, 144 

Laud, Archbishop, 155 

Lawrence, William B., 108 

Lee, Bridget, 143 

Leister, Edward, 144 

Leland, 8 

Leverett, John, 115 

Leverett, Thomas, 115 

Leyden, 51-60, 95, 96, 119, 128, 

135. 143. 147, 148. 152, 155. 

179, 180; St. Peter's Church, 

51, 96, 180 
Lincoln, England, 7, 172 
"Little James," The, 95 
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 104, 108 
Longfellow's "The Courtship of 

Miles Standish," 79, 91 
Lord, Abigail, 152 
Lothrop, Jane, 143 
Lothrop, Rev. John, 143 
Lound, England, 184, 187 
Louth, En^and, 4-7 



INDEX 



[91 



Mann, Jasper, 147 

Margeson, Edmund, 147 

Marshfield, Mass., 152 

Martin, Christopher and wife, 
147 

Massachusetts Bay Colony, 88, 
99, 100, 112-116, 132, 155 

Maverick, Moses, 131 

May, Dorothy, 52, 84, 135 

"Mayflower," The XIV, 4, 60- 
67. 75-80, 84, 92, 96, 100, 104, 
107, 112, 115, 116, 127, 131, 
140, 148, 151, 152, 156, 163, 
164, 167, 175, 180 

Mayson, Mayor John, 36 

McQeary, James T., 108 

Meyer, George Von L., 104 

Middleboro, Mass., 143, 148 

Milner, 184 

Milnes, Richard Monckton, 44 

Minter, Desire, 147 

More, Ellen, 147 

More, Jasper and his brother, 
147 

Morton, George, 95 

Morton's "New England's Me- 
morial," 76, 100, 183 

"Mourt's Relation," 95 

Mullins, Joseph, 147 

Mullins, Priscilla, 128, 147 

Mullins, William and his wife, 
139. 147 

Naughton, ^$ 

New Plymouth (see Plymouth 

Mass.) 
Newcomen, John, 132 
Norris, Mary, 128 

Penn, Christian, 131, 143 

Pierce, John, 92 

" Pilgrimage of Grace," The, 4-7 

Plummer, Ann, 147 

Plymouth, England, XIV, 63, 
67, 92, 163-164, 168, 180 

Plymouth, Mass., VII, XIV, 8, 
II, 79-103, 112, 115, 116-120, 
132, 188; Pilgrim Stone, 79, 

83, 127; Cole's Hill, 83; The 
Fort, 84-87, 116; The Church, 

84, 116-119; Pilgrim Hall, 92; 
Burial Hill, 1 16 

Power, Solomon, 147 

Priest, Degory, 147 

Prince, Thomas, 183 | 



Provincetown, Mass., 67, 103- 
112, 151 

Puritans, The (see Massachu- 
setts Bay Colony) 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 56 

Rassieres, Isaac de, 87 

Retford, England, 1 1 

Revere, Paul, 120 

Reynolds, Captain, 63 

Rigdale, Alice, 147 

Rigdale, John, 147 

Robinson, John, 11-15, 43, 52, 

59, 60, 95-96, 155, 172, 175, 

176, 179, 180 
Rogers, Joseph, 147 
Rogers, Thomas, 147 
Roosevelt, President, VII, 103, 

104, III, 184 
Ryton River, 7 

Salem, Mass., 100, 131, 152 
Sampson, Harry, 147 
Sandwich, Mass., 147 
Savage, James, 167 
Scituate, Mass., 147, 152 
Scrooby, England, 8, 11, 12, 16, 

31, 39, 40, 51, 84, 119, 136, 

167, 175 
Sears, Captain J. H., 104 
Sempringham, England, 7 
Smith, Captain John, 56, 168 
Smith, Ralph, 88, 119 
Smyth, John, 11, 16, 51, 175 
Snow, Damaris, 144 
Snow, Nicholas, 144 
Soule, George, 147-148 
Southampton, England, 60, 63, 

128, 180 
Southworth, Edward, 95, 135 
"Speedwell," The, 59-63 
Standish, Barbara, 95, 151 
Standish, Captain Miles, 59, 79, 

83, 84, 95, 96, III, 128, 148- 

151, 152 
Standish, Rose, 148 
Story, Ellen, 148 

Taft, President, VII, 103, 104, 

III 
Tattershall Castle, England, 7 
Thompson, Edward, 151 
Tilley, Ann, 151 
Tilley, Edward, 151 
Tilley, Elizabeth, 144, 151 
Tilley, John and wife, 144, 151 



92 



INDEX 



Tinker, Thomas, and wife and 

son, 151 
Torksey, England, 4 
Townes, Thomas, 163 
Trent River, 3, 4, 11, 15, 40 
Trevore, William, 151 
Turner, John, and Sons, 151 

Van Weede, M., 108 
Vassall, Judith, 152 
Vassall, WiUiam, 152 
Vincent, Sarah, 147 

Warren, Richard, 140 
Warren, Sarah, 140 
Webster, Daniel, 103 
Wesley, John, 3, 175 
Wetmore, George Peabody, 104 
Wheldon, Catherine, 144 
White, Justice, 104 
White, Peregrine, 151-152 
White, Resolved, 151, 152 



White, Susanna, 151, 152 
White, WilHam, 151, 152 
Whittier, VII, 176, 
WickHffe, 4 
Wilberforce, 183 
Wilder, Roger, 152 
WiUiams, Roger, 88, 119 
Williams, Thomas, 152 
Wilson, John, 88, 91, 99 
Winslow, Edward, 59, 92, 95, 

119, 135, 152-156 
Winslow, Gilbert, 156 
Winslow, John, 92, 140 
Winthrop, Governor John, 88, 

91, 99, 100, 115 
Winthrop, Robert Charles, 103 
Witham River, 15, 31 
Woburn, England, 36 
Wolcott, Governor, 184 
Wolsey, 8 

Yarmouth, Mass., 131, 140, 144 




